> All of this talk of identifiers has made me wonder if there is any good
> reason that a URL in XML code should be restricted to "safe",
> "non-reserved" characters. Wouldn't it make more sense to require the XML
> processor to do the necessary escaping before transmitting the URL across
> the wire? It seems simpler to let the processing software deal with it
> rather than forcing the human to do so (the current case).
The trouble is that "http://whoever.net/foo?bar" doesn't mean the
same thing as "http://whoever.net/foo%3Fbar"; the latter induces the
server to look for a file named "foo?bar", whereas the former queries
the resource "foo" with the request "bar".
-- John Cowan cowan@ccil.org e'osai ko sarji la lojban.