[Zope-dev] Non-ASCII characters in URLs

[Dieter Maurer]

Martijn Pieters wrote at 2008-4-7 10:39 +0200:
>On Mon, Apr 7, 2008 at 1:37 AM, Alexander Limi <limi at 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