- From: Tim Bray <tbray@textuality.com>
- Date: Sat, 08 Mar 2003 15:23:41 -0800
- To: Chris Haynes <chris@harvington.org.uk>
- Cc: uri@w3.org
Chris Haynes wrote:
> "Tim Bray" proposed:
>
>>- ASCII characters which may legally appear in the component MUST
>> appear directly as themselves, i.e. 'a' may not be encoded as %61.
>
> My understanding is that the decision on whether or not an ASCII
> character 'may legally appear' (at any particular position in the URI)
> is not at all well defined and is scheme-specific.
Scheme-specific I believe. "Not well defined" seems like a symptom of a
broken scheme.
>
> Witness the several recent requests to this list by Israel Viente re:
> file:/e:/xxx.pdf versus file:/e%3a/xxx.pdf and the like - I don't
> think anyone was able to give him quick, unambiguous answers.
This would tend to support the general feeling that the "file:" URI
scheme is basically broken. Further evidence of that fact is that there
is very poor interoperability in the field.
> Unless and until the URI RFC _and_ all schemes can be shown to have
> completely unambiguous syntaxes in this respect, developers will have
> to 'play safe' and escape questionable characters.
I see your point, but if a scheme is so broken that a programmer can't
be sure what needs escaping, then it needs fixing.
--
Cheers, Tim Bray
(ongoing fragmented essay: http://www.tbray.org/ongoing/)
Received on Saturday, 8 March 2003 18:23:42 UTC