Re: Rewrite of feature tag syntax rules

Larry Masinter:
>
>It's a common difficulty with URL processing, to the point
>where we wrote a special section in the revised URL draft
>on "when to escape and when not to escape". But the short
>answer is that you cannot 'unescape' a URL except when you are
>parsing it into its component parts. Thus, URL equivalence
>using %XX = <character represented by that byte> is unacceptable. 

OK.  This seems to settle the issue of whether to do %XX processing
when comparing feature tags.

I do feel that we need an 7-bit-to-8-bit escape mechanism for feature
tag values, because we want to allow 7-bit protocols to re-use the
feature negotiation infrastructure, AND we want to be able to support
value spaces which are not 7 bit clean.  %XX is the best candidate for
such escaping, so I do want to require %XX processing in tag values.
Note that in the next rewrite of the draft, tag values will _not_ look
like URL components, we are changing the separator character from # to
=.

>Look at latest draft-fielding-url-syntax-* in the internet
>drafts directory.
>
>Larry

Koen.

Received on Thursday, 15 May 1997 01:31:51 UTC