At 22:29 05/01/25, Julian Reschke wrote:
>The big difference here is that XMLNS uses IRIs/URIs as identifiers and only for that. However, what is an XSLT that transforms Atom content to HTML supposed to do when it encounters a IRI which isn't a legal URI? For instance, it can't put it into an HTML href attribute without producing invalid HTML.
First, the Atom spec just says that HTML or XHTML goes into certain elements, it leaves it to other specs to say what HTML or XHTML is. So Atom doesn't deal with the question of whether IRIs are allowed there or not, and I hope PaceIRI is worded correctly in that respect.
Second, HTML href attributes are defined as CDATA, so in terms of validity, any Unicode character goes anyway.
Third, the HTML 4 recommendation, dating back to 1997 (http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-html40-971218/appendix/notes.html#h-B.2) contains language that in today's terms amounts to saying "browsers should treat URIs with non-ASCII characters as IRIs, even though strictly speaking, they're illegal". Many browsers to some extent already do, and when the IRI RFC gets out, I guess some more will.
Forth, when IRIs work, people, especially in regions that don't use the Latin script, will just expect them to work, and tools will just have to support them, so things will just develop naturally.
Regards, Martin.
