Message-Id: <9305251852.AA23208@nada.kth.se>
To: brennan@hal.com (Dave Brennan)
Subject: Two forms for URLs
In-Reply-To: Your message of "Mon, 17 May 1993 16:56:37 CDT."
<9305172156.AA25380@hysteria.hal.com>
Date: Tue, 25 May 1993 20:52:34 +0200
From: Peter Svanberg <psv@nada.kth.se>
Quoting: brennan@hal.com (Dave Brennan)
> I also liked the concept proposed by the gang in Sweden about placing
> information in URLs to make them more readable in different languages. I've
> got a few interesting ideas on how to accomplish this which I may eventually
> have a chance to write up. Given an intelligent front end program, it
> should be possible to display a URL in a nicer format. Unfortunately, the
> big problem with this is that you run the risk of a user trying to use the
> "pretty printed" version. Therefore, I conclude that while information
> should probably be provided to allow nicer formating applications should be
> highly discouraged from displaying these "invalid" URLs.
>
> Their example URL was: <ftp://othello.admin.kth.se/pub/l%e4s mig>
>
> (And we'll quietly ignore that rogue space ;-)
>
> This was described as the "program form." I don't belive there should be a
> "human form" because it would be too easy to mix them up. Rather, an
> application should display this without the URL syntax. This is assuming
> that it's even necessary to display a URL, which should be infrequently.
I don't see any problem with mixing the "program" and "human" forms -
programs handling URLs can easily distinguish them from each other and
should be able to parse both forms. (All according to our suggestion.)
--- Peter Svanberg, NADA, KTH <psv@nada.kth.se>