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[tech] [eli5] URI = IRI = ASCII = UTF-8 = Unicode

Stephane Bortzmeyer stephane at sources.org

Sun Jan 3 13:55:22 GMT 2021

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On Wed, Dec 30, 2020 at 12:25:31AM +0100, Petite Abeille <petite.abeille at gmail.com> wrote a message of 14 lines which said:

URI's use UTF-8 encoded octets only by popular convention and not by

any hard rule. You can stick any kind of binary data into a URI as

long as you percent-encode the non-ASCII bytes.

Yes, indeed. Any random binary will do, e.g. the query portion could

contain any weird binary data one sees fit to put there.

Not so much in other parts of the URI though, UTF-8 rules there.

This is not true. As Michael said, URI are bytes, not characters. Theencoding is anyone's guess.

Two details:

paths (not just queries) can contain any binary garbage but thereare special rules for hostnames.

the RFC has provisions for "a new URI scheme" which may apply tous. We can decide here that URI of scheme "gemini" MUST be entirely inUTF-8.