Re: Feedback on draft-gregorio-uritemplate-00

Mark Nottingham wrote:
> 
> +1 to dropping component spanning and doing percent-encoding during 
> substitution, as well as UTF-8.
> 
> However, this will require that the data model for the input to 
> substitution be formalized more, as others have pointed out -- which I 
> think is a good thing.

I disagree.

> Consider:
> a = "foo/bar"
> 
> http://www.example.com/{a}
> http://www.example.com/foo?path={a}
> 
> The first will need the '/' escaped; the second will not.
> 
> So, the input data model needs to be something like:
> 
> {'a': ('foo/bar', PATH_SEGMENT)}
> 
> In practice, this might mean that particular uses of templates will need 
> to specify the types of their variables.

Here, I disagree on two levels.

First, I will note that this argument is based solely on the difference 
in the templates -- your example does different things with the SAME 
inputs.  What you seem to be arguing instead is that each part of a URL, 
e.g. the path info, the query, etc., has a different set of reserved 
characters that must be quoted.

Second, if the specification follows the recommendation that you give in 
this example, you actually surprise many.  I would suspect that most 
would see that template and assume that they can pass in a path, and 
find out that if the results are served statically by a server such as 
Apache HTTPD, paths won't quite work as expected.

- Sam Ruby