- From: Jon Knight <jon@net.lut.ac.uk>
- Date: Wed, 16 Apr 1997 11:20:06 +0100 (BST)
- To: Edward Cherlin <cherlin@newbie.net>
- Cc: uri@bunyip.com
On Tue, 15 Apr 1997, Edward Cherlin wrote: > >Proposal 1a: Do not allow such characters, since the URL is an address > > and not a user-friendly string. Obviously, this solution > > causes non-Latin character users to suffer more than people > > who normally use Latin characters, but is known to interoperate > > on all Internet systems. > > Impractical. We do agree an this, don't we? Weren't URL's originally designed to have an _opaque_ part? In which case just ASCII is fine as its not intended to give meaning (the fact that alot people (including me) do put meaningful ASCII text in there is a result of most of web is still using file system based web servers. The meaningful name is the only way of the information provider locally naming the document so that they can remember what it contains. If you see stuff coming from a web server that fronts a database you quite often just get random looking strings of ASCII characters that only mean something to the server as the information providers have other means to name and locate the resources locally). IMHO the push for I18N should be in Uniform Resource *Names*, not URLs, so that the broken "put meaning in an address" paradigm isn't perpetuated even further than it currently is. > I assume that no Webmaster will deliberately set up a CGI script for UTF-8 > without knowing whether the server can handle it. He can provide a Java > applet to any browser that doesn't know what to do. So who has the problem? How about those of us using non-Java, non-UTF-8 aware browsers (lynx for example)? Or that have Java disabled by the systems administrator for security reasons? Tatty bye, Jim'll -=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=- Jon "Jim'll" Knight, Researcher, Sysop and General Dogsbody, Dept. Computer Studies, Loughborough University of Technology, Leics., ENGLAND. LE11 3TU. * I've found I now dream in Perl. More worryingly, I enjoy those dreams. *
Received on Wednesday, 16 April 1997 06:21:58 UTC