Re: Ambiguity of Allowed/Recommended URI Syntax and Escaping

The specification requires things that are necessary for interoperability,
and suggests things that are desirable for good practice/robustness.
None of the issues you mentioned are necessary for interoperability,
and in fact you will find that implementations don't care one way or
the other.  That is why "?" in query is reserved instead of disallowed,
since it is more robust for parsers to expect it to be present (and
treat it as data) rather than not expect it and think of it as an error.
URI generators, OTOH, are encouraged to use such characters only when
they are used according to a reserved purpose, which in the case of
"?" inside a query means never.  That is not a contradiction, and
certainly isn't ambiguous, since the specification both defines
parsing and makes recommendations to URI generators.

....Roy

Received on Monday, 18 November 2002 01:02:54 UTC