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Subject: Proposed text for 2.2.5


In today's editor's call, I volunteered to draft some text that normatively
allows spaces in input and presentation, disallows them in the BNF and
generally discouraging their use. This is the same approach taken by IRI in
section 3.1 and 6.1. Here's the proposed text.

Infrastructure accepting or presenting XRIs MAY deal with printable
characters in the "excluded" set above, escaping them on input and/or
unescaping them prior to presentation. A string that contains these
characters in an unescaped form, however, is not technically a legal XRI.

Note that presenting the "space" character in unescaped form is especially
risky for several reasons. First, it is difficult to visually determine the
number of spaces in a string. An identifier that contains a run of several
unescaped spaces would be very prone to misinterpretation and transcription
errors. Second, the space character is often used to delimit an XRI, so
including unescaped spaces in a string makes it difficult, and sometimes
impossible, to determine where the identifier ends. Finally, unescaped
spaces can be used to maliciously construct subtly different identifiers
intended to mislead the reader. For these reasons, unescaped spaces SHOULD
be avoided in presentation.




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