Re: alpha v0.2

["Martin J. Duerst" <duerst@w3.org>]

At 23:57 00/01/22 +0800, James Seng wrote:
> take two! i added new comments, took out some, edited others and added a few
> other clause. comments pls.
> 
> few points to discuss and i realised missing.
> 
> 1. localization needs. for example, some queries raised on the issues of
>    doing <COUNTRY>.<2LD>.<DOMAIN>.<HOST> in the reverse way. Make more sense
>    for some languages and country convention. 
>    (Oh boy, this is going to get flame!)

Apart from bidi (which you discuss below), I don't think we should
touch that. Many people have proposed that URIs be changed to
looks something like http://org.w3.www/... It would indeed be
more logical. The British email system for a long time used
this top-down sequence. What you probably refer to is that
in some parts of the world, postal addresses are top-down,
and in others, they are bottom-up. Localization is important
to make sure that postal addresses are printed right.
But I would say that domain names are not postal addresses.


> 2. localization needs again. Does double-width period counted as a domain
>    delimitator like a single-width period? On a similar notes, this is
>    related to double-width Alphanumeric vs single-width alphanumeric.

These are somewhat similar from a user viewpoint. But because one
is a syntactically significant character, and the others are one
category of variants.

I think it may be possible to include double-width Alphanumeric
as allowable (although I'm really not sure it's a good idea).
On the other hand, having to change the DNS to accept two
different things as delimiters would be too much, so I
guess this should be made a front-end issue.


> 3. localization need once more. How to handle right->left writing order
>    such as Arabic. One consideration is treat this as an non-issue because,
>    for example, MS Windows CP1256 which defines Arabic actually encodes
>    the domain name in the correct byte order as per norm from left->right
>    but the render reverse it. On the other hand, this may not apply on
>    some other system such as Mac or Unix.

As for internal encoding, there is no other way than doing it the
same everywhere. Otherwise, recursion and delegation just fail.
As for display, to some extent it may be a local issue, but
part of identifiers such as dns is that they also have to
work on paper. Inside a label, which we can see as something
like a word, it's clear that we should use the natural writing
order, otherwise it's just unreadable. For the sequence of
labels, it's not as easy, because we have to think about
mixed names (i.e. names where some labels go one direction,
and others the other direction).


Regards,   Martin.


#-#-#  Martin J. Du"rst, World Wide Web Consortium
#-#-#  mailto:duerst@w3.org   http://www.w3.org