Re: iDNR, an alternative name resolution protocol

>The issues of introducing spaces other ASCII excluded characters within
>a URI are not significantly different from those surrounding the
>introduction of non-ASCII characters.

The obvious problem with whitespace is when parsers attempt to locate the
beginning and end of a URI.  The intention was to use the {brackets} or
other grouping symbol as an escape symbol specifically for the hostname to
specify its beginning and ending, where the parser can know NOT to interpret
whitespace as the end of a URI.  In this scenario, the whitespace could
perhaps be replaced by a single obscure character (*not* "%20").  But the
iDNR proposal is one that dares to ask for first-ever support for escaping
out long and unlimited (up to 255 characters) strings in the URI, beginning
with the open grouping symbol and ending with the closed grouping symbol.

This even extends into line breaks:

ftp://{
Big FTP Server;
Computer Science Department;
Billy Bob University;
USA
}/pub/stuff/something.txt

Obviously, this format would have to be handled in actual practice rather
delicately, as such URIs would, of course, not be compatible with previous
URIs.

Jon Davis



-----Original Message-----
From: Larry Masinter <masinter@parc.xerox.com>
To: Harald Tveit Alvestrand <Harald.Alvestrand@maxware.no>; Jon Davis
<jdavis@INETINIT.ORG>; ietf@ietf.org <ietf@ietf.org>
Cc: URI distribution list <uri@bunyip.com>
Date: Monday, August 31, 1998 10:52 PM
Subject: RE: iDNR, an alternative name resolution protocol


>Martin Duerst and I have been working on a revised version of
>'draft-masinter-url-i18n', which lays out some of the issues around
>introducing more 'Human Friendly' URIs, at least for humans who
>speak/write languages other than English.
>
>I submitted a revision to Internet-Drafts, but there've been several
>revisions since; I suggest you fetch it from:
>
> ftp://ftp.parc.xerox.com/pub/masinter/draft-masinter-url-i18n-03.txt
>
>The issues of introducing spaces other ASCII excluded characters within
>a URI are not significantly different from those surrounding the
>introduction of non-ASCII characters.
>
>I suggest 'uri@bunyip.com' as the mailing list most appropriate for
>this discussion.
>
>Larry
>--
>http://www.parc.xerox.com/masinter
>
>
>

Received on Tuesday, 1 September 1998 09:18:02 UTC