Re: Unwrapping urn:public:...

[John Cowan <jcowan@reutershealth.com>]

dcpleland@ftnetwork.com wrote:


>> In fact, every time you fill out a form in a browser
> 
> which has nothing to do with urls

Au contraire.

>> but if the form is of type GET, then the plus signs
>> are directly in the search part of the URL, right after the "?" character.
> 
> Everything to the right of the '?' is a query,

True.

> not part of the url.

False.  See section 3.4 (and 2 and 1.6) of RFC 2396.
Note also the BNF in appendix A.  The query *is*
part of the URL.  (The fragment id (following "#") is not.)

> In the bibliographic citations for RFC 2396, RFC1866 is cited.
> So whatever points may have been contained in 1866 have been considered,
> and it can be considered to be superseded by 2396.

How can the standard for URI syntax override the definition of
the MIME type application/x-www-url-encoded, which is part
of the HTML definition?

> I suggest that it is inappropriate for us to change it at this point.

We aren't.

See the HTML 4.01 Recommendation at
http://www.w3.org/TR/html4/interact/forms.html#h-17.13.4 , bullet
point 1:

# 1. Control names and values are escaped. Space characters are
# replaced by `+', and then reserved characters are escaped as described
# in [RFC1738], section 2.2: Non-alphanumeric characters are replaced by
# `%HH', a percent sign and two hexadecimal digits representing the ASCII
# code of the character. Line breaks are represented as "CR LF" pairs
# (i.e., `%0D%0A').

As for standards vs. Recommendations vs. RFCs, the electronic mail we
exchange is not defined by a standard, the TCP/IP Internet over which
it travels is not defined by a standard, and XML is not defined by
a standard.

-- 
There is / one art             || John Cowan <jcowan@reutershealth.com>
no more / no less              || http://www.reutershealth.com
to do / all things             || http://www.ccil.org/~cowan
with art- / lessness           \\ -- Piet Hein