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

[David Sheets <kosmo.zb@gmail.com>]

On Tue, Jan 22, 2013 at 7:52 PM, Liam R E Quin <liam@w3.org> wrote:
> 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 :-)

Ahh... I didn't realize the implied formality of my inquiry to that
list. Thanks for the info.

> 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.

Ok. That is good to know. IMHO, I think the wording of the Context B
and Context C sections could use a little work to make it clear that
"#" is not allowed after "#". As you indicate, it is not and so I am
satisfied.

Thanks for taking the time to assuage my confusion and educate me.

David