FWIW, while I agree with the "spirit of making this BCP guidance, rather than rules", I don't see how changing "MAY" to "can" or a "SHOULD NOT... but instead" to "are encouraged to" is helpful (substituting terms that are well-defined with words that seem to be similar in meaning but less well-defined. The keywords MAY, SHOULD, SHOULD NOT seem to me to be sufficient "guidance" in a BCP-status document. Perhaps it would be helpful to add a kind of applicability statement at the beginning that these guidelines are intended to apply to "http:" and "https:" URIs and those with similar patterns and SHOULD be considered for others, although they don't seem to be relevant for URI-schemes that don't use the generic syntax with hierarchical paths (such as "urn:" or "data:" or "mailto") There is no need to consider the philosophic difference between a name and a locator. It's a matter of choosing a syntax for serialization of a data structure and the implication of ownership and origin that comes with some syntactic arrangements for some implementations. Larry -- https://LarryMasinter.net
