Re: [apps-discuss] draft-pbryan-zyp-json-pointer: name syntax for non-ASCII

[Julian Reschke <[e-mail]>]

On 2011-11-22 10:09, "Martin J. Dürst" wrote:
> On 2011/11/22 8:43, Mark Nottingham wrote:
>> The usual approach to this sort of thing is to define the "canonical"
>> way to do it; i.e., json pointers *are* unicode strings; then you can
>> define encodings into various environments (like URIs).
>>
>> In this case, it'd probably be good enough to say that json pointers
>> are unicode strings,
>
> Up to here, this makes a ton of sense.
>
>> but that when they need to be in ASCII environments (like URIs) they
>> get UTF-8'ed and then percent-escaped.
>
> This would mean that e.g. in a Java program that for some reason is kept
> in US-ASCII, I'd have to use %-encoding. This doesn't make sense to me
> at all.
>
> So I'd say that json pointers are escaped according to the conventions
> of the substrate that carries them when needed (e.g. pure ASCII, or
> other kinds of encodings that can't handle the whole Unicode range).
>
> Then for json pointers as fragment identifiers, I'd mention that where
> necessary (e.g. for URIs), the convention for converting from IRIs to
> URIs (see RFC 3987) applies.

+1 up to here.

> By the way, I don't see a need to escape "/" at all in a fragment
> identifier. "/" is plain and simply allowed in fragment identifiers.
> Please see http://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc3986#section-3.5. Of course,
> it's not forbidden to escape "/", so software that is interpreting a
> fragment identifier has to make sure it does the right thing.
>
> Regards, Martin.
> ...

The escaping of "/" refers to the fact that "/" is used as delimiter in 
the pointer syntax (so if you have "/" in a token you need to escape it).

Speaking of fragment identifiers -- sounds like somebody is working on a 
fragment identifier syntax for the JSON media type???

Best regards, Julian