URL escaping

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Date: 17 Nov 93 13:55 -0800
From: George Phillips <phillips@cs.ubc.ca>
To: www-talk@nxoc01.cern.ch
Message-id: <6868*phillips@cs.ubc.ca>
Subject: URL escaping

Ari says:
>??? I thought HTTP doc specifies how to escape illegal characters
>in URL?

Maybe this is something that should be clarified.  From the point
of view of a browser, here's how I see it:

URL's are opaque, except:

	you know how to parse the //host:port stuff
	you understand "/" so you can do relative paths
	you understand "#" for hopping into documents and "?" for searches

For certain schemes, URLs become even less opaque to the broswer.
For example, for "gopher:", you _must_ use % hex escaping because
the browser must decode the URL for use in gopher.  This is probably
true for "file:", "news:" and other URLs as well -- the browser
must know about the escaping because it will do the decoding.

For "http:", it's different.  The browser doesn't do the decoding
(except for some /#? stuff) and depends on the HTTP server to
give it 7-bit ascii encoded URLs.  As long as it spits out
7-bit ascii, the encoding is completely up to the server.

Is this the way things are, or am I way off here?

			-- George