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