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

From: Larry Masinter <masinter@parc.xerox.com>
Date: Sun, 11 Feb 1996 01:52:04 PST
To: dwm@shell.portal.com
Cc: fielding@avron.ICS.UCI.EDU, http-wg%cuckoo.hpl.hp.com@hplb.hpl.hp.com
Message-Id: <96Feb11.015216pst.2733@golden.parc.xerox.com>
> I'm sorry, but the + is also an encoding character based on RFC 1866
> and current practice. It encodes anoother unsafe character, the SPace.

> We could debate forever whether we need both, but we have both.
> And I suspect that the + for SPace is an effective optimization since
> many forms require spaces but few +es.

Every character encodes something. The character 'A' really is just an
encoding of the octet 65, after all.

I'm not sure what your point is, though. I think HTTP servers and
proxies need to be aware of '%xx' encoding, in that some URLs might
have extra %xx encodings sent to them, etc.

On the other hand, HTTP servers may not need to know much about '+'
except that some HTML user agents do some kind of processing which
produces them.
Received on Sunday, 11 February 1996 01:53:41 UTC

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