W3C home > Mailing lists > Public > ietf-http-wg@w3.org > January to March 1996

Re: HTTP 1.0&1.1 URL safe characters conflict with HTML?

From: Roy T. Fielding <fielding@avron.ICS.UCI.EDU>
Date: Fri, 09 Feb 1996 14:50:07 -0800
To: "David W. Morris" <dwm@shell.portal.com>
Cc: http working group <http-wg%cuckoo.hpl.hp.com@hplb.hpl.hp.com>
Message-Id: <9602091450.aa29929@paris.ics.uci.edu> 
> Reviewing not quite current HTTP 1.0 and 1.1 drafts I noticed that the 
> plus sign (+) character is included as a safe character.
> 
> This would seem to be in conflict with current practice and the HTML
> RFC where the + is part of the url encoding scheme to represent blanks.

It is safe, and "+" does not represent blanks.  The "+" character is
used to separate keywords in a URL generated by an ISINDEX query,
but those separators are not equivalent to blanks.  Since the query part
is generated, there is no need for "+" to be reserved in the URL syntax,
which is why it is not reserved in RFC 1738.


 ...Roy T. Fielding
    Department of Information & Computer Science    (fielding@ics.uci.edu)
    University of California, Irvine, CA 92717-3425    fax:+1(714)824-4056
    http://www.ics.uci.edu/~fielding/
Received on Friday, 9 February 1996 15:38:15 UTC

This archive was generated by hypermail 2.4.0 : Thursday, 2 February 2023 18:42:57 UTC