Martijn Pieters wrote at 2008-4-7 10:39 +0200:
On Mon, Apr 7, 2008 at 1:37 AM, Alexander Limi <limi@plone.org> wrote:
Is there a good technical explanation for why Zope doesn't allow non-ASCII characters in URLs?
Because URLs don't allow non-ASCII characters?
Almost surely, Alexander wants to ask why Zope does not allow non-ASCII characters in ids. And, in fact, there are only two reasons: * lazyness of the Zope developpers: without the restriction to ASCII characters careful quoting (and unquoting) is necessary in order to adhere to RFC 2396 (the modern uri syntax specification) * there is no way to specify the encoding used for non ASCII characters. HTML 4 suggests to convert non ASCII characters first to UTF-8 and then url escape the result but most HTTP clients do not follow this suggestion. Instead, they use the charset found one the page that cause them to construct the uri. I have observed that MS WebDAV from some WebDAV commands transfers the url as given and for some other commands recodes them into utf-8. Thus, supporting non ASCII ids occationally may cause surprises. -- Dieter