URL schemes containing +, -, or .

I have an Internet Draft (draft-hamilton-whois-url-00.txt) which
specifies a URL format for the WHOIS++ protocol using the scheme
"whois."  Now, it's been suggested that there really ought to be
separate schemes for the old WHOIS protocol, WHOIS++, and RWhois
- defined by (respectively) RFCs 954, 1835 and 1714.

Question: the obvious choice for WHOIS++ would be "whois++", but
would this blow up any code ?  e.g. proxy servers, HTML editors,
and web crawlers.  Please let me know if your stuff will go gaga
when it sees "whois++://" !

According to RFC 1738...

   Scheme names consist of a sequence of characters. The lower case
   letters "a"--"z", digits, and the characters plus ("+"), period
   ("."), and hyphen ("-") are allowed. For resiliency, programs
   interpreting URLs should treat upper case letters as equivalent to
   lower case in scheme names (e.g., allow "HTTP" as well as "http").

Toodle pip!

Martin

Received on Thursday, 9 May 1996 04:10:53 UTC