[5434] in www-talk@info.cern.ch
Question on HTTP URLs
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (John Franks)
Wed Aug 31 23:18:50 1994
Date: Thu, 1 Sep 1994 05:10:12 +0200
Errors-To: listmaster@www0.cern.ch
Errors-To: listmaster@www0.cern.ch
Reply-To: john@math.nwu.edu
From: john@math.nwu.edu (John Franks)
To: Multiple recipients of list <www-talk@www0.cern.ch>
I am writing an HTTP server and I plan to have it recognize URLs
like the following:
http://host/dir1/dir2;search=wais?query
http://host/dir1/dir2;search=keyword?query
http://host/dir1/dir2;search=title?query
http://host/dir/file;info
These will do various types of searches or in the last case
provide a description of the file generated on the fly.
My question is will the use of the ';' as a delimiter for parameters
cause any conflicts with current or planned usage. According to
the most recent document I can find on the subject the ';' is reserved
(see excerpt below) but there is no indcation of its intended use.
By my reading of this document it is completely legal to have a
';' in my URL if it is URL escaped. But I would like to know
if it can be unescaped as in the examples above.
Here is an excerpt from:
Uniform Resource Locators T. Berners-Lee
draft-ietf-uri-url-06.txt L. Masinter
Expires March 13, 1995 M. McCahill
Begin excerpt
An HTTP URL takes the form:
http://<host>:<port>/<path>?<searchpart>
...
Within the <path> and <searchpart> components, "/", ";", "?" are
reserved. The "/" character may be used within HTTP to designate a
hierarchical structure.
End excerpt
John Franks Dept of Math. Northwestern University
john@math.nwu.edu
