Re: Next steps for rfc6874bis

[Brian E Carpenter <[e-mail]>]

On 17-Aug-21 22:30, Philip Homburg wrote:
>> Andrew offered ABNF to back up his assertion, I can't point to it from my
>> phone but you'll find it upthread somewhere. Whether real world parsers can
>> respect it is a question for the parser authors.
> 
> If I got it correct he is basically saying that RFC 3986 is wrong. 
>>From https://mailarchive.ietf.org/arch/msg/ipv6/ocNXw2Tl7YnOXOVjnUJ_VS7PI88/
> "That is a bug.  The '%' must be treated as the syntactic delimiter it is.

Well, the issue is that the prose in RFC3986 isn't really consistent
with the ABNF, where the pct-encoded construct is precisely defined and used.
A parser that strictly follows the ABNF will only apply percent encoding
(and decoding) where the ABNF tells it to, not to the whole string. That's
exactly the point we need to discuss with the implementers in WHATWG.
 
> If RFC 3986 is wrong, then that must be updated. I don't know how tricky
> that will be, it is an old RFC and the original RFC 1738 dates from 1994
> and also has text that '%' needs to be encoded.
> 
> I'm curious how they want to update RFC 3986.

We (the IETF) are "they". Unfortunately, there's another "they", the
implementers, and in the end the implementers win, because running
code trumps rough consensus.

   Brian