Re: IRIs, IDNAbis, and HTTP

Mark Nottingham wrote:
> Personally, I am *very* -1 on doing this.
> 
> Changing the allowable characters in a protocol element is a *big* 
> change, and there is not an interoperability gain to doing so.
> 
> There is also not a functionality gain; it is possible (if not pretty) 
> to serialise other characters into HTTP headers.

I think the key question here: is that implemented in practice? (In 
particular, which encoding?) If yes, fine (and maybe let's document what 
works). But if not...?

> Furthermore, HTTP headers for the most part don't carry user-visible 
> data, and when they do, it's often an IRI, for which there is a 
> well-understood serialisation into header-safe characters.

None of the usages in RFC2616 is a IRI (by definition :-).

And, as Brian observed, IRI->URI mapping is not sufficient if you need 
to *exactly* reconstruct the original IRI (such as when the IRI is used 
as a name, e.g. an Atom link relation).

> ...

BR, Julian

Received on Friday, 14 March 2008 10:27:57 UTC