Re: location uri, ucs and the http scheme definition.

Robert Collins wrote:
> On Mon, 2005-08-08 at 05:56 -0500, William A. Rowe, Jr. wrote:
> 
>>>>That said; for example WinNT's filesystem is truly unicode, which Apache
>>>>2.0, for example, treats as a utf-8 filesystem for resource names.  The
>>>>typical *nix system today may in fact use utf-8 file names, but does
>>>>not enforce them (they remain opaque octets to the posix layer).  It's
>>>>entirely up to the implementor what to serve based on a URI.
>>>
>>>Yes. That's a problem. See <http://greenbytes.de/tech/webdav/draft-reschke-webdav-url-constraints-latest.html> for a work-in-progress attempt to fix things at least for WebDAV.
>>
>>Ack :)  The more comprehensive solution of course, HTTP/1.2, 
>>although I know some have their hearts set on HTTP-NG first.
> 
> I'd be happy with a HTTP/1.1 errata that updates the http:// scheme to
> declare it as utf8 before the escape encoding is done.

You cannot change the declaration.  The best thing that can be done
within the HTTP/1.1 errata is to note that utf8 is one accepted and
common mapping, and suggest it as a preferred presentation format.

Your server needs to only accept URI's that it is willing to serve,
so if every resource it serves was %-encoded utf8, this is entirely
legitimate.  But your client applications must be willing to send any
arbitrary octet stream %-encoded, and treat href's that it will handle
as an unknown/arbitrary mapping.  That is, unless your client has the
limited scope of connecting to your server.

Bill