Re: Options for draft-ietf-6man-uri-zoneid

On Fri, May 4, 2012 at 10:10 AM, Juergen Schoenwaelder <
j.schoenwaelder@jacobs-university.de> wrote:

> On Fri, May 04, 2012 at 09:54:36AM -0400, Simon Perreault wrote:
> > On 2012-05-04 09:44, Juergen Schoenwaelder wrote:
> > >On Fri, May 04, 2012 at 08:29:11AM -0500, Rajiv Asati (rajiva) wrote:
> > >>+1 for option 3 with hyphen.
> > >>
> > >>I like to be able to read the URI without having to put my glasses on.
> > >
> > >Interface names can contain other fancy characters and hence this one
> > >will simply not work in the general case.
> >
> > The character just after the address is "special". We know it is
> > special because it is just after the address. It can never be
> > confused with the interface name itself. We could even choose
> > something ridiculous, e.g. "x", as the special character and there
> > would be no possibility of conflict.
>
> Or even '%'.  Oops... never mind.

> My understanding is that URI formats place restrictions on the set of
> allowed unquoted characters. Some vendors (e.g. Juniper) use interface
> names that even contain slashes, e.g. fe-0/0/0. While replacing the %
> separating the zone identifier (typically an interface name) solves
> one problem, it does not solve the problems with fancy characters in
> the zone identifier.
>
> If you look at the draft, you see that Brian has defined
ZoneID = 1*( unreserved / pct-encoded )
so any "fancy" characters would need to be pct-encoded in the URI
representation, but not in the UI.

Do we want to take this one step further and update RFC 5952 with some
sort of canonical representation for link-local addresses?  I'm thinking
that
in the fullness of time it would certainly be nice to have cut-and-paste
compatibility across IPv6 utilities.  We could certainly retrofit e.g. ping6
to use either '%' or '-'.  The folks who use it now (wizards) could continue
to use the old separator or do the mental gymnastics in their heads (they
are wizards, after all).  Folks like my mom wouldn't even have to be aware
that '%' was ever used (unless they're history of technology majors).

-K-

> /js
>
> --
> Juergen Schoenwaelder           Jacobs University Bremen gGmbH
> Phone: +49 421 200 3587         Campus Ring 1, 28759 Bremen, Germany
> Fax:   +49 421 200 3103         <http://www.jacobs-university.de/>
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