Re: revised "generic syntax" internet draft

["Roy T. Fielding" <[e-mail]>]

>I reiterate that there is consensus on integrating text
>for UTF-8 as the recomended character encoding into the
>draft.

That is a lie.

>We have a proposed wording, two paragraphs which
>I don't think I need to repeat.

That is true.  I wrote that wording because your prior wording was
too confusing, not because I agreed with it.

>I have only heard very
>general arguments against this wording, arguments which
>I have showed to be untrue or irrelevant.

That is a lie.  You have an opinion, Martin, and Larry has an opinion,
and I have an opinion.  You did not show any of my arguments to be
untrue or irrelevent, and the only thing you have demonstrated is that
you think URLs should be treated as filenames.  Well, I disagree.

The only question that matters is whether or not the draft as it
currently exists is a valid representation of what the existing
practice is and what the vendor community agrees is needed in the
future to support interoperability.  I have yet to hear *any* support
for your additional requirements from the vendor community, and I
know for a fact that they do not correspond to any existing plans
of the Apache Group.  Since it is my opinion that it is NEVER desirable
to show a URL in the unencoded form given in Francois' examples,
you cannot claim to hold anything even remotely like consensus. 
In fact, the "rough consensus" of the HTTP development
community is that the URL namespace belongs to the origin of the name,
and no client has the right or need to reinterpret that name for
the purpose of display.  That is what the current draft says, and it
does so in a way that DOES NOT PREVENT any future use of URLs to be
of a single character set encoding.

IF you can persuade the creators of URLs to always use UTF-8, which
is definitely not the case today (Apache, NCSA, and CERN servers all
use whatever charset is used by the underlying filesystem, which on
most Unix-based systems is iso-8859-1 or iso-2022-*), then you can
make claims of consensus.  Until then, your opinions have been answered
to the best extent possible by the editors, and with far more
civility than in your responses.

 ...Roy T. Fielding
    Department of Information & Computer Science    ([e-mail])
    University of California, Irvine, CA 92697-3425    fax:[phone]
    http://www.ics.uci.edu/~fielding/