octets and octets

Another comment regarding draft-fielding-uri-rfc2396bis-04.txt:

The various encoding levels and issues are not terribly clear in
Section 2, and there is no overall explanations of the levels
involved which would give the user a chance to get an overall
picture. It would be highly desirable to add something like
Adam's overview/summary at
http://www.w3.org/mid/4.2.0.58.J.20040217085342.05f84b20@localhost,
I'm very sure this would help a lot of people. Some tweaks
to the example might improve this, but mostly, it could be
used as is.

Even more urgent is some change at the start of section 2.1.
The start of section 2 talks about URI characters and octets
(the octets by which the URI characters are represented if they
are represented electronically).

Section 2.1 then starts:
"A percent-encoding mechanism is used to represent a data octet in a
component when that octet's corresponding character is outside the
allowed set or is being used as a delimiter of, or within, the
component."

It is an easy guess that a large percentage of readers will get
confused here because they confuse the octets in the section 2
prologue and the octets in 2.1. A sentence or clause saying
something like:
"Data octets discussed here are not the same as the octets
discussed above; URIs can represent data octets, and can then
in turn again be represented by octets if stored electronically."


Regards,     Martin.

Received on Sunday, 7 March 2004 06:43:16 UTC