- From: Larry Masinter <masinter@parc.xerox.com>
- Date: Sun, 11 Feb 1996 01:18:16 PST
- To: dwm@shell.portal.com
- Cc: fielding@avron.ICS.UCI.EDU, http-wg%cuckoo.hpl.hp.com@hplb.hpl.hp.com
+ should be 'reserved'. The definition of 'reserved' is whether the character has the same interpretation whether escaped or not escaped. 'reserved' characters may appear in URLs, and must only be escaped when used within a context where it has a reserved meaning and would otherwise be confused with that meaning. (This depends on the scheme; for example '@' is has a reserved meaning in 'mailto:', but '/' does not. % is special, because it *is* the encoding character. It's labelled 'unsafe' because unsafe characters may not appear in URLs. You can say '% may not appear in URLs' but of course, the "except for its use within an escape sequence". HTTP is unusual in that the HTTP protocol is defined to take the part of the URL after the hostpart and just send it, unmodified; this behavior is different from that of gopher:, ftp:, mid:, etc. in that most other URL schemes call for the constituant parts to be unescaped before transmission. I recall having no end of problems with proxy servers that did 'too much' processing on the URLs. I wonder if it is possible to reference 1738 and 1808 rather than replicate but modify the information contained therein.
Received on Sunday, 11 February 1996 01:22:35 UTC