[art] Re: Alternative representation of URIs in YANG

[Martin Thomson <[e-mail]>]

Hi Kent,

On Thu, Dec 4, 2025, at 06:03, Kent Watsen wrote:
>> URIs are more complicated than your decomposed structure allows for.  That's the problem.  If you are going to represent a URI, it really has to be a string.
>
> I believe you, but I'm unsure what I missed in RFC 3986...
>
> Does this regard the percent-encoded form of a URIs that don't  follow 
> the "normal circumstance" mentioned in the first paragraph here: 
> https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/html/rfc3986#section-2.4?   Would it 
> help for this draft to state that the values MAY be percent-encoded?

I was inclined to ask what the "ietf-inet:uri" definition says, but it really doesn't say anything.  Which is OK.

That section says this:

> Once produced, a URI is always in its percent-encoded form.

In other words, don't worry about that, because octets that are not in the URI grammar will be percent-encoded by the thing that produces the URI.  (If that's you, great. You get to learn how to make a URI. No doubt you will get it "wrong" by some objective measure, but that's OK, because everyone does. The way we cope is that most URI-handling software will either manage or not work.  So you can test.  That's not a great story, but it's the one we've got.)