Re: UTF-8 URL for testing

[Larry Masinter <[e-mail]>]

Just because a problem is important doesn't
mean that we should recommend something that has not yet
been demonstrated to actually solve the problem.

The proposal of hex-encoded UTF-8-encoded Unicode
has not been demonstrated to actually solve the problem
of letting people in Japan use URLs in Japan and people
in Israel use URLs in Hebrew. In fact, it hasn't yet
been demonstrated, as far as I can tell, to let Franc,ois
use the correct spelling of his own name in his own URLs.

Instead of trying to convince me about how easy this is
to demonstrate, or to claim that there is "wide consensus"
that someone else should implement this, we need to actually
have a demonstration of the technology. If Amaya or Jigsaw
were to include support for this method of encoding
of URLs, for example, it would go a long way, but they don't,
at least not in a way that demonstrates that the proposal
actually solves the problem that the proponents of the proposal
are claiming are so important that we solve. They don't let
people type in URLs in any syntax other than ASCII, they don't
display URLs in any form other than their %A0%0E%FE%B0 form,
and as such it makes no sense for us to continue to discuss.

If this is were to be a W3C recommendation, it should be
supported by the W3C software.
--
http://www.parc.xerox.com/masinter