On 23/10/2012 00:32, Mark Nottingham wrote:
...
> The underlying point that people seem to be making is that there's legitimate
> need for URIs to be a separate concept from "strings that will become URIs."
> By collapsing them into one thing, you're doing those folks a disservice.
> Browser implementers may not care, but it's pretty obvious that lots of other
> people do.
Thanks for bringing this point out. It was explained to me in 1993 by TBL and
Robert Cailliau that URLs (the only term used then, I think) should never
be typed in by a user, and preferably never even seen by a user. It's because
that doctrine was abandoned a year or so later that we have this problem
today. I think there would be value in a document making this clear, as
a framework for clearly separating the specification of what is allowable
as a URI on the wire from what is acceptable as a user input string (UIS?).
UIS to URI conversion may well end up as a heuristic algorithm.
Regards
Brian
