Re: [xml-dev] Escaping and Encoding of reserved URI characters inXPointe

[Liam R E Quin <liam@w3.org>]

On Tue, 2013-01-22 at 19:07 -0800, David Sheets wrote:

> <blockquote>
> Thus, when a pointer is inserted into an IRI reference, any
> occurrences of percent signs (%) must be escaped. Other characters may
> be escaped as well, though it is not recommended. Characters are
> escaped as follows:
> </blockquote>
> 
> I think this section should recommend escaping all characters that are
> not in the IRI fragment production (including the
> hash/hatch/number/pound/sharp/cross/octothorp/tictactoe sign (#)). Is
> that correct?

Not entirely, it's more complicated than that. The complexity of
treating URIs as strings and processing them in different languages with
different syntactic constraints is one of the great attractions of the
XLink specification, which can make even simple things sound complex :-)

But it could be that tomorrow's XML Core meeting will discuss it; I
don't know how far down the agenda we'll get.

In general, Working Groups aren't good places to ask quick questions,
because the W3C Process requires every comment on a spec to be discussed
by the Working Group until consensus is reached. We do welcome comments
once you're up to speed, but usually it's more productive to ask
"questions of clarification" elsewhere - e.g. on this list :-)

The short answer is that what you escape depends on what you've already
escaped and where you're putting the result, as you can't %-escape
percent signs or the # marking the start of the fragment id.

Liam


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Liam Quin - XML Activity Lead, W3C, http://www.w3.org/People/Quin/
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