Re: Square brackets in query component

On Thursday, July 15, 2004, at 06:44  AM, Al Gilman wrote:
> At 11:25 PM -0700 7/14/04, Roy T.Fielding wrote:
>> Use of IP addresses (of any form) within a URI is not desirable
> for mainstream practice,...
>
> Only if 'mainstream practice' ignores the needs of trouble reporting.

Yep, it does.  What I should have said is that such URIs are never
crafted by hand or expected to be used on a regular basis as
identifiers, and thus it is okay to expect that the software
generating a reference containing a query component with square
bracket characters is capable of percent-encoding those characters,
and furthermore that such a reference is unreadable already due
to its length and thus not subject to concerns about the encoding
being ugly.  Meanwhile, existing software will automatically encode
those characters because they are special to Unix command-lines
and thus dangerous to pass unencoded to legacy CGI scripts, so
even if we did allow them, much of the software that processes
query components would not.

....Roy

Received on Thursday, 15 July 2004 14:50:50 UTC