Re: [webfinger] Webfinger and URI vs IRI

[Barry Leiba <[e-mail]>]

> Please stop this "only for presentation" myth that essentially means that
everything is legible as long as it's English.

It's not a "myth", Martin.  It's a question of who needs to read it.
 Humans don't have to read what's in the JSON.  The application that shows
a URI to a user will have to render it in a way the user can read it.
 That's where we get the presentation layer.

Barry

On Tuesday, July 23, 2013, "Martin J. Dürst" wrote:

> Hello everybody,
>
> On 2013/07/23 6:27, Paul E. Jones wrote:
>
>> Barry,
>>
>
>  The reason I raise this is that RFC 5988 refers to the target IRI (the
>> “href” in WebFinger link relation) and context IRI (the “subject” and
>> “aliases” in WebFinger).  Only ASCII is used in some protocols, so the
>> IRIs must be formatted as URIs.
>>
>
>  However, JRD is JSON and, therefore, Unicode.  Thus, we could easily
>> accommodate links like this:
>>
>
>     {
>>
>>      "rel" : "test2",
>>
>>      "href" : "http://example.org/私の 文書.txt"
>>
>> }
>>
>
>  As opposed this form:
>>
>
>     {
>>
>>      "rel" : "test2",
>>
>>      "href" :
>> "http://example.org/%E7%A7%81%**E3%81%AE%20%E6%96%87%E6%9B%B8.**txt<http://example.org/%E7%A7%81%E3%81%AE%20%E6%96%87%E6%9B%B8.txt>
>> "
>>
>> }
>>
>
>  I have no strong preference, but the text did have IRI mentioned in one
>> place in the JRD spec section, but it was not consistent through the
>> document.  Everywhere else, we specified URI.
>>
>
>  So, if IRIs are truly only for presentation,
>>
>
> That's clearly not the case. IRIs are used in HTML and other places.
>
>  then the latter example above
>> should be what WF servers return.  The query target is always a
>> percent-encoded URI, so it’s a non-issue.
>>
>
> For most of you, the differences between the above two examples are mostly
> irrelevant, and the second one may even look more familiar. But for those
> who can read the first one (Japanese, although the space is highly
> suspicious, because Japanese doesn't use spaces), the first one is very
> clear, whereas the second one is complete gibberish.
>
> As a slightly related example, one could write
>      "rel" : "test2"
> as
>      "rel" : "%74%65%73%74%32"
> and it would provide about the same level of useless obscuration.
>
> Please stop this "only for presentation" myth that essentially means that
> everything is legible as long as it's English.
>
> Regards,   Martin.
>