# Re: The use of "?" in URLs

Mark P. McCahill (mpm@boombox.micro.umn.edu)
Wed, 9 Mar 94 09:44:16 CST

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    Date: Wed, 9 Mar 94 09:44:16 CST

    Message-Id: <9403091544.AA12396@boombox.micro.umn.edu>

    From: "Mark P. McCahill" <mpm@boombox.micro.umn.edu>

    To: timbl@www0.cern.ch, uri@bunyip.com

    Subject: Re: The use of "?" in URLs

In message <9403091022.AA08523@ptpc00.cern.ch> writes:
> ...
> you see that the use of "?" is outside differences between
> schemes in priciple. In fact, the syntax mentions a search
> option for each relevant scheme separately simply in order
> to save confusion when people try to search news articles, etc.
> However, hijacking the "?" as a separator for transfer mode
> as yandros@MIT.EDU suggests, or using a tab for a search separator
> as Mark McCahill suggests are neither approporiate.
>

It might or might not be appropriate to use <tab> as a seperator for
the search term, but it definately IS appropriate to use <tab> as a
seperator for the gopher+ stuff at the end of the gopher URL since either
under my argument (<tab>s are good seperators for gopher since they never
occur in any of the gopher strings), -or- under Tim's argument ("?" denotes a
search and should be used only as a seperator for search terms) using <tab>
for the gopher+ seperator makes sense.

I think we are left with deciding if "?" should be mandated as the seperator
for search terms across all URLs. I can live with whatever the consensus for
this is...

..but, I'm trying to figure out how this would work with a URL for an SQL
database server. Presumably, you would want to allow the user to enter search
terms for several fields in the SQL database. Would that imply that you use
"?" many times within the URL? How would you denote the field names for each
of the fields that the user might enter new search terms for? I'm having a hard
time seeing how the "?" convention Tim is talking about will work with a URL
pointing to a relational database; but an SQL URL is something that would be
nice to accomodate without breaking the general mandates of seperator formats
for URLs.

The current URLs are only being applied to a few services, and for long term
extensibility it might be a god idea to keep the number of general assumptions
that must apply to all URLs to a minimum. As URLs get applied to more and
different services some of the original assumptions may be hard to accomodate.

> The idea is that anyone (without looking at the scheme)
> can see that such URLs are search URLs. The client can
> represent it specially and do a whole load of scheme-independent
> processing. For example, it can allow the user to
> perform a new search, stripping of the search bit and adding
> a new one. The "?" is basically a separator between
> machine-usable
>

Of course to actually do a search or retrieval, the client still has to
know the details of the given protocol, so I question how much you really
gain from saying that all URLs that have a search function should use "?"
as a seperator.

Mark P. McCahill

gopherspace engineer/University of Minnesota
mpm@boombox.micro.umn.edu
612 625 1300 (voice) 612 625 6817 (fax)

- Next message: John A. Kunze: "Re: The use of "?" in URLs"
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- Maybe in reply to: Tim Berners-Lee: "The use of "?" in URLs"
- Next in thread: John A. Kunze: "Re: The use of "?" in URLs"