# Re: URL revision

Daniel W. Connolly (connolly@hal.com)
Thu, 21 Jul 1994 00:07:55 -0500

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    Message-Id: <9407210507.AA10669@ulua.hal.com>

    To: Larry Masinter <masinter@parc.xerox.com>

    Subject: Re: URL revision

    In-Reply-To: Your message of "Wed, 20 Jul 1994 17:09:31 PDT."

                 <94Jul20.170935pdt.2761@golden.parc.xerox.com>

    Date: Thu, 21 Jul 1994 00:07:55 -0500

    From: "Daniel W. Connolly" <connolly@hal.com>

In message <94Jul20.170935pdt.2761@golden.parc.xerox.com>, Larry Masinter write
s:
>
>Survey results:
>
>12. The URL: prefix requirement is still controversial, in that there
>are still strong opinions about it. If we were voting (which we were
>not) the votes would have it moved. I'm reluctant to touch this
>without a stronger mandate.

Hello? Did I miss it again? WHAT IS THE ARGUMENT IN FAVOR OF THIS?
I recall about 5-7 'nays' on this issue and not a single 'yea'.

And please change the url-wrapper chars. <> are already overloaded
for message-ids, mail addresses, and SGML tags. Just use "", or '',
or {}, or space, or anything but <>. If the purpose of the wrapper
chars is to distinguish URLs from other things, they do not
serve it well. In fact, their use is counter to that purpose.

>1-2, 22: The discussion on the list helped clarify, at least for me,
>the position of reserved and unsafe characters; the clarification made
>some of the questions on the survey irrelevant, but it was useful.
>3: There was no sentiment to remove WAIS at this time: saint@wais.com
>has offered to review the WAIS syntax, which I have not yet checked.

The useful distinction, as I see it, is that reserved characters
mean different things encoded vs. unencoded, whereas safe/usafe
chars mean the same thing encoded vs. unencoded. I think this
distiction should be made explicitly in the draft, ala:

Most characters mean the same thing when represented
as themselves as when represented in %XX syntax. The
exceptions are the reserved characters:
; / ? = & @ % # :

If you don't put # in the reserved set, you're conflicting
with the practice of relative URLs. e.g. a file named foo.html#bar
_must_ be represented as foo.html%23bar, or it will be seen
as a filename/fragment combo, in current practice.

If you don't put % in the reserved set, folks might think they
can write a URL for a file called foo%aa as scheme://host/foo%aa, when in
fact they must write scheme://host/foo%25aa.

Dan

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