# Re: Source-routed URLs

John Labovitz (johnl@ora.com)
Fri, 30 Sep 94 17:54:25 -0700

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    Message-Id: <199410010054.RAA20337@rock>

    To: lazear@gateway.mitre.org

    Subject: Re: Source-routed URLs

    Date: Fri, 30 Sep 94 17:54:25 -0700

    From: John Labovitz <johnl@ora.com>

lazear@gateway.mitre.org said:

> The other construct is used by Gopher and uses percent signs to
> separate pieces. This construct is less clear to me.
>
> gopher://host.sys.com/0ftp%3aftp.host.sys2.com%40/dir/file

For URLs in general, percent signifies that the next two
characters are a hexidecimal code for a character. It's
used to quote characters that aren't otherwise legal within
a URL. So the FTP portion of the above URL probably
translates to:

ftp:ftp.host.sys2.com@/dir/file

For more about the syntax, see:

http://info.cern.ch/hypertext/WWW/Addressing/URL/5_URI_BNF.html

> Could we also discuss why the two constructs for stacking URLs
> need to be different? Is there an effort to make them the same?
> Is this an area for an IETF working group?

They're probably different just because Gopher came before
the Web. Maybe the developers of Gopher servers could be
persuaded to convert their gateway construct into a URL.

> PPS - What is the sharp-sign construct, by the way? In a URL, it appears
> after the document filename:

It signifies an anchor label within a document. So a file
called foo.html could have HTML like this:

...some text...
<A NAME="bar">description of bar here</A>
...some more text...

Then "foo.html#bar" will refer to that particular section.
Most browsers will automatically scroll to the specified label.

For a somewhat obscure description, see:
http://info.cern.ch/hypertext/WWW/Addressing/URL/4_2_Fragments.html

in:

http://info.cern.ch/hypertext/WWW/Addressing/Addressing.html

    --
    John Labovitz
    Global Network Navigator <http://gnn.com/>
    O'Reilly & Associates, Sebastopol, California, USA (+1 707 829 0515)

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