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

> On this you are wrong ... See RFC 1866, section 8.2.1. + is clearly
> used to encode spaces:

*sigh*  No, RFC 1866 is wrong.  The HTML WG has managed to propose
a well-known bug in Mosaic for standardization.  So be it.

> unsafe or reserved, I don't care but + isn't safe. If the choice is
> 'reserved', then I believe % should also be 'reserved' as it has
> exactly the same role as + as it is used to encode other
> characters. I see no justification for + to be reserved and
> % unsafe.

The choice of reserved vs unsafe is a question of parsing, not semantics.
A reserved character may appear anywhere "reserved" is allowed in the
URI (which is true of "+").  An unsafe character cannot appear in a URI
except by being replaced by its %hexhex encoding (which is true of "%
and is not true of "+").  The "%" character is thus only allowed in a
URI when it is immediately followed by two hex characters.


 ...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/