Re: URI Templates: done or dead?

On Sep 16, 2008, at 4:08 PM, William A. Rowe, Jr. wrote:

> John Cowan wrote:
>> Phillips, Addison scripsit:
>>> We have pretty good knowledge of what makes a good Unicode
>>> identifier. If we're going to assign variable names in a new pattern
>>> language, why are we limiting it to alphanum? The software we are
>>> linking to (the part generating the variables that get  
>>> substituted in)
>>> may not--indeed probably does not--have that same limitation.
>> Given that URIs are ASCII-only, I think it is sufficient to have
>> identifiers be ASCII-only too.
>
> Actually, I thought they were opaque bytestreams wrapped in ASCII,  
> e.g.
> %80 or %FF in a URI should be valid in the resource path, no?

Yes, so one answer would be to allow percent-encoded-UTF-8 in the
variable names as well.  That would address the issue of external
field names being non-ASCII without introducing the horror of
non-octet-based name comparisons.

....Roy