[mapguide-internals] RESTful Ramblings of a Restless Lunatic

Haris Kurtagic haris at sl-king.com
Thu Oct 11 15:14:07 EDT 2007


Truth is the most parser implementation will encoded everything beside
digits, letters and - _ . ~ ( or very close to that ).

Also I don't understand what you mean about looking at [ .
I think if we wrote it as [ character or user type it as "[" then it
will appear as "[" character in string, how browser will send it encoded
or not encoded is than another thing...

Haris

-----Original Message-----
From: mapguide-internals-bounces at lists.osgeo.org
[mailto:mapguide-internals-bounces at lists.osgeo.org] On Behalf Of Jason
Birch
Sent: Thursday, October 11, 2007 8:52 PM
To: MapGuide Internals Mail List
Subject: RE: [mapguide-internals] RESTful Ramblings of a Restless
Lunatic


The one that is not encoding it is behaving illegally :)

The BNF-like description section of the spec contains the following
(fairly clear) wording:  The "national" and "punctuation" characters do
not appear in any productions and therefore may not appear in URIs. 

And national is defined as:  { } | [ ] \ ^ ~

I see your point about encoding/decoding I guess, but I'd hate to use a
separator that couldn't be easily distinguished in the URL string.  It
would make troubleshooting difficult.

Jason


-----Original Message-----
From: mapguide-internals-bounces at lists.osgeo.org
[mailto:mapguide-internals-bounces at lists.osgeo.org] On Behalf Of Haris
Kurtagic
Sent: Thursday, October 11, 2007 11:25
To: MapGuide Internals Mail List
Subject: RE: [mapguide-internals] RESTful Ramblings of a Restless
Lunatic

Regarding [ ] characters, two major browser's behavious differently, IE
and Firefox, one will encoded one will not.
Any how , those characters are interpreted normally by browser and
server.
Regarding encoded I believe that at the end when we will develope all
functionality ( sql queries, spatial filters, MapGuide identifiers,..)
REST URI will certainly not look "nicely" to human eye.
I think that is something which is not that important and after
implmenting RESTfull principles beside first-entering URI, other URI's
will not be important to user or application.

I think it is important that URI parser undoubltly and quickly can
identify resources in URI path, but that doens' mean it is nessecceray
[] combination.
I saw some suggestion's to use ! in path to separate filter part.

Haris 

-----Original Message-----
From: mapguide-internals-bounces at lists.osgeo.org
[mailto:mapguide-internals-bounces at lists.osgeo.org] On Behalf Of Jason
Birch
Sent: Thursday, October 11, 2007 7:25 PM
To: MapGuide Internals Mail List
Subject: RE: [mapguide-internals] RESTful Ramblings of a Restless
Lunatic

You're absolutely right Bob (well, from my reading anyway), reference
here:

http://www.w3.org/Addressing/URL/uri-spec.html

The character doesn't really matter to me, but I don't want to see it
being encoded.  Basically, we just need a common way of separating the
resource from the filter.

Looks like the only open/close option is standard parens (), but there
are a lot of single delimiter such as $ or @

To avoid problems, it would be nice if we could choose a delimiter that
is not a valid resource names in MapGuide if possible.  Any suggestions?
Now you're going to tell me that MapGuide allows any URI-valid
characters :)

Jason

-----Original Message-----
From: Robert Bray
Subject: Re: [mapguide-internals] RESTful Ramblings of a Restless
Lunatic

I just did some checking and the way I read the URI specification (RFC
3986) square brackets [ ] are not valid within the path portion of a
URI. Hence they would need to be encoded as %5B and %5D.

Someone else should probably look and validate that. I decided to check
because I have never seen brackets used within a URI path before, and
non-standard syntax always raises a flag in my head.
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