Re: Globalizing URIs

At 7:44 AM 8/3/95, Gavin Nicol wrote:
>I don't mind where the information is put, but one reason
>for preferring:
>
>     http:[EUC]//www.jacme.co.jp/%B0%F5%BA%FE.html
>
>over
>
>     http://www.jacme.co.jp/[EUC]%B0%F5%BA%FE.html
>
>is that the latter could very will be a legal name within the system,
>leading to ambiguity.

I disagree. The person in charge of www.jacme.co.jp is in charge of
creating the object-name part of the URLs. They can make up unambiguous
names. End users don't make up URLs, or if they do, they shouldn't assume
anything about how the server will respond to their requests.

In the case you give, the server administrator can specify that:
- [EUC]%B0%F5%BA%FE.html is an alias/link to the file called %B0%F5%BA%FE.html
- [anything] is truncated from all incoming URLs since it is only useful to
folks looking at URLs, not the server
- [EUC]%B0%F5%BA%FE.html returns a different result than [XYZ]%B0%F5%BA%FE.html
All of these are decisions made by the server adminstrator and anyone who
he or she allows to create URLs.

That being said, I think it's fine for people who create URLs that might
have different character sets to use a consistent naming character set
scheme, and client makers can choose whether or not they want to do
something smart about those names. However, it should not be a change to
the current URL RFC at this very late date. Feel free to create a seperate
draft that describes this as an optional naming convention.

--Paul Hoffman
--Proper Publishing

Received on Thursday, 3 August 1995 09:38:28 UTC