Re: RFC 2822 email addresses in tag URIs

Charles,

The context here is tag URIs, not mailto URIs.  Tags are opaque 
identifiers.  It's the minting of them -- in particular, the ability of 
humans to mint them unaided -- where the issues lie.

Cheers,

Tim.

Charles Lindsey wrote:

> 
> On Tue, 11 Oct 2005 18:01:56 +0100, Sandro Hawke <sandro@w3.org> wrote:
> 
>> Given that it's possible to include %-escapes later and not really
>> possible to remove them later if they are allowed now, I'm inclined to
>> go with the "simplicity" approach for now.  I have to admit, though,
>> that I don't really know much about the politics of these extended
>> e-mail address characters.
> 
> 
> I would take the opposite view. If the address is a valid email address  
> according to RFC 2822, then it SHOULD be possible to create a mailto 
> URI  for it. It some stupid person chooses a complicated email address 
> with  strange characters in it, and wants to publicise it on some 
> website. then  he will just have to put up with the ugliness of the URI 
> - he has only  himself to blame, especially if he creates it wrong. The 
> vast majority of  people do not choose such awkward names.
> 
> But if you forbid %-encoding, then over-officious software is going to  
> reject perfectly good URIs unnecessarily whilst at the same time more  
> liberal software will happily handle them. Getting the over-officious  
> sites to change their ways if youm later decide to allow them will be  
> difficult.
> 
> And it is not as if disentangling %-encoding is hard. Every site 
> handling  URIs already contains the code to do it.
> 

-- 

Tim Kindberg
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Received on Wednesday, 12 October 2005 12:08:53 UTC