RE: URLencoding.

> From:	Dave Bridger [SMTP:dbridger@inlink.com]
> 
> 
> Specification is very unclear and RFC1738 does not help at all. The
> mailing list
> archive produces only a partial thread which only partly help to clarify
> the
> situation.
	[DJW:]  
	The only omission I can see in RFC 1738 is "+", which looks to
	me something that was redundantly added to forms, without
	thinking about things properly.  This ought to be <reserved>
	rather than <safe>.


> Fortunately RFC1738 is permissive so the overencoding practice will not
> harm
> anything.
	[DJW:]  
	Unfortunately there are applications that underdecode, typically
	by matching the encoded string, rather than decoding it first, or
	by assuming that the string could never be encoded.

> Can anyone give me a definitive answer as to which characters need not be
> escaped?
> 
> Perhaps Section 17.3.4 of the HTML Spec should be clarified.
> 
	[DJW:]  It is not the job of the HTML spec to define the structure
	of URLs

Received on Friday, 7 April 2000 07:14:21 UTC