Re: Comments on html 3.0 draft

Larry Masinter (masinter@parc.xerox.com)
Wed, 26 Apr 95 03:50:34 EDT

> Regarding URIs and URLs the matter is vague. In RFC 1630 URIs are
> recommended to encode the not ascii part of ISO 8859-1, but says that
> the safe characters that need not be encoded if the environment allows
> it. In RFC 1738 it appears that all characters outside the ascii range
> must be encoded.
> The need to encode normal letters is a pest!

I'll claim that this (html-wg) is the wrong forum for discussing this
issue. HTML can and should accept URIs as they are defined elsewhere,
and say as little about them as possible. However, the
character-set-in-URI issue was discussed ad nauseum in the URI working
group, and pot-shots should not be taken lightly.

I think the HTML 3.0 draft might want to resynchronize with the 2.0
draft on the language around character sets once 2.0 is out the door.