Re: [whatwg] New URL Standard from Anne van Kesteren on 2012-09-24 ([e-mail] from September 2012)

[John C Klensin <[e-mail]>]

--On Wednesday, October 24, 2012 11:39 +0100 Brian E Carpenter
<[e-mail]> wrote:

> 
> On 23/10/2012 00:32, Mark Nottingham wrote:
> ...
>> The underlying point that people seem to be making is that
>> there's legitimate need for URIs to be a separate concept
>> from "strings that will become URIs." By collapsing them into
>> one thing, you're doing those folks a disservice. Browser
>> implementers may not care, but it's pretty obvious that lots
>> of other people do.
> 
> Thanks for bringing this point out. It was explained to me in
> 1993 by TBL and Robert Cailliau that URLs (the only term used
> then, I think) should never be typed in by a user, and
> preferably never even seen by a user. It's because that
> doctrine was abandoned a year or so later that we have this
> problem today. I think there would be value in a document
> making this clear, as a framework for clearly separating the
> specification of what is allowable as a URI on the wire from
> what is acceptable as a user input string (UIS?).
> 
> UIS to URI conversion may well end up as a heuristic algorithm.

Very useful perspective, IMO.

Seen that way, IRIs might then be considered a different flavor
of UIS.  Less heuristic than some, but not a flavor of URI.

best,
   john