Fwd: Re: Impact of changing a specification from URI to IRI and XRI

At 2006-12-01 09:47 +0000, Paul Spencer wrote:
>The only danger I know of in using non-ASCII characters is if any harm can
>be caused by someone maliciously (or otherwise) replacing an ASCII character
>with a similar-looking non-ASCII character.

But I believe IRI strings still can only have valid Unicode
characters.  It isn't just an arbitrary binary string.

I just looked up some details in http://tools.ietf.org/rfc/rfc3987.txt

The above mapping from IRIs to URIs produces URIs fully conforming to

[RFC3986].  The mapping is also an identity transformation for URIs

and is idempotent;  applying the mapping a second time will not

change anything.  Every URI is by definition an IRI.
>This is the basis of many
>phishing attacks. I don't really see how that affects us, but then I also
>don't see how allowing non-ASCII characters helps us significantly either.
>Do we really need our identifiers to be that multi-lingual?

Yes, I absolutely believe that the identifiers do.  In the ISO
paperwork I see go by my desk the Asian comments about IRI strings
are raised for a number of specifications in which URI strings are used.

. . . . . . . . . . . Ken

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