Re: Comments on draft-fielding-uri-rfc2396bis-07

On Tue November 9 2004 21:08, Mike Brown wrote:

> I think Roy's position is that rfc2396bis does not impact the current (RFC 
> 1738) mailto scheme, so you only need to worry about the changes introduced in 
> rfc2396bis when someone gets around to updating the mailto scheme to be based 
> on it.

The current mailto scheme specification is RFC 2368, not 1738.
 
> However, even if you apply rfc2396bis's definition of 'reserved' to scheme 
> specs that simply say "percent-encode all reserved characters in data", they 
> are not broken by the changes, as there's no harm in percent-encoding in most 
> cases.

True that changing implementations to percent-encode where it
would be required by the RFC 2396bis draft change to the definition
of reserved characters should not cause URI parsers trouble
since encoding is safe. 

> It may not always be necessary to percent-encode reserved characters,  
> is all rfc2396bis is saying, because it's possible that they do not have a 
> reserved purpose in the URI component in which they appear.
[...]
> Nevertheless, I think one could write a book that explains, more thoroughly 
> than rfc2396bis, the nuances of percent-encoding and of representing data 
> characters & octets with URI characters and percent-encoded octets.

I think it could be done in no more than a few paragraphs, and
your text above is a great deal clearer than the self-contradictory
text in the draft.

Received on Wednesday, 10 November 2004 22:14:41 UTC