Subject: W.G. Last Call on "Preferred Format for Literal IPv6 Addresses in URL's"

From: Bob Hinden <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 20 Jul 1999 11:10:37 -0700

This is a IPng working group last call for comments on advancing the
following document as a Proposed Standard:

	Title		: Preferred Format for Literal IPv6 Addresses in URL's
	Author(s)	: B. Hinden, B. Carpenter
	Filename	: draft-ietf-ipngwg-url-literal-02.txt
	Pages		: 4
	Date		: 15-Jul-99

Please send substantive comments to the ipng mailing list, and minor
editorial comments to the authors.  This last call period will end two
week from today on August 3, 1999.

Bob Hinden / Steve Deering

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From: Craig Metz <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 20 Jul 1999 14:23:16 -0400

In message <[email-masked]>, you writ
>week from today on August 3, 1999.

  Please choose a delimiter character that is not interpreted as a special
character by *IX shells.

									-Craig

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From: Craig Metz <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 20 Jul 1999 15:31:24 -0400

In message <[email-masked]>, you write:
> In your previous mail you wrote:
>
>=> too late, there are many URLs with '?' characters in them
>(and '?' is a special character for UNIX shells)...

  We cannot fix what is wrong with the web (well, with a time machine and a two
by four, maybe), but we can try to prevent new wrongs.

									-Craig

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From: Francis Dupont <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 20 Jul 1999 21:29:28 +0200

[email-masked]

---

From: Brian E Carpenter <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 20 Jul 1999 16:58:38 -0500

Craig,

>   Please choose a delimiter character that is not interpreted as a special

Please be more specific. Are you objecting to [] ? If so what
is your counter-proposal; it has to be reasonably intuitive
as well as being possible to fit into the URL syntax.

  Brian

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From: "Ed Boraas" <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 20 Jul 1999 12:37:28 -0600

----- Original Message -----
From: Bob Hinden <[email-masked]>
To: <[email-masked]>
Sent: Tuesday, July 20, 1999 12:10 PM
Subject: W.G. Last Call on "Preferred Format for Literal IPv6 Addresses in
URL's"

> week from today on August 3, 1999.

Hello there.

I am concerned that the choice of brackets as an enclosure for IPv6
addresses in URLs may cause problems for people using UNIX and UNIX-like
OSes, as most shells interpret the brackets as special characters. One could
not (if I am not mistaken), invoke lynx from the commandline as follows:

lynx http://[FEDC:BA98:7654:3210:FEDC:BA98:7654:3210]:80/index.html

but would rather have to use backslash escapes, like this:

http://\[FEDC:BA98:7654:3210:FEDC:BA98:7654:3210\]:80/index.html

If there is a possibility of choosing another, non-"special" character, I
would heartily endorse the change.

Yours,

Ed Boraas

---

From: "Perry E. Metzger" <[email-masked]>
Date: 20 Jul 1999 19:31:53 -0400

> by four, maybe), but we can try to prevent new wrongs.

I'm not sure that there are better characters really available. Most
of the "obvious" ones are also bad. Also, literals are rare, and ?'s
in URLs are very, very common.

Not to say that a good idea wouldn't be a nice thing but I'm just not
sanguine that the barn door isn't being shut a bit late.

Perry

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From: Erik Bertelsen <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 21 Jul 1999 10:22:12 +0200

> as well as being possible to fit into the URL syntax.

If I recall correctly, one of the reasons for choosing [] despite of
being active characters in Unix shells was that there was precedence
for doing just this -- again if my memory serves correctly -- in
the rsh/rcp family of programs when the remote machine is known by
IP address instead of by name.

If there is no good choice of delimiters, we should at least choose
the least bad ones, and preferable choose some that are consistent
with previous history...

Erik Bertelsen, UNI-C.

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From: Ignatios Souvatzis <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 21 Jul 1999 10:24:04 +0200

> would heartily endorse the change.

As far as I remember, this has been discussed in-depth long ago, and no better
choise was found.

Btw, a more intuitive way to call lynx would be:

lynx 'http://[FEDC:BA98:7654:3210:FEDC:BA98:7654:3210]:80/index.html'

	-is

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From: Francis Dupont <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 21 Jul 1999 11:29:31 +0200

=> this is for mail (RFC 822), not for rsh/rcp which doesn't usually
work with literals.

=> I agree, if there is no better counter-proposal we should go with []!

[email-masked]

---

From: Brian E Carpenter <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 21 Jul 1999 09:48:42 -0500

Ignatios Souvatzis wrote:
...
> lynx 'http://[FEDC:BA98:7654:3210:FEDC:BA98:7654:3210]:80/index.html'

Sure, this works today. In my test, lynx actually returned
an error 400 from the local proxy, clearly showing that
the "[" was passed to the proxy which then couldn't
parse the new syntax.

   Brian

---

From: [email-masked] (Sam Manthorpe)
Date: Wed, 21 Jul 1999 09:56:05 -0700 (PDT)

> the least bad ones, and preferable choose some that are consistent

Yes, and [] is not bad IMO.   In most shells, [] would only be a problem
in the command line if there happens to be a file in the current working
directory that would be matched by the [] wildcard, which for URLs
would be pretty rare.  csh, sh and bash all work fine.  I haven't tried
others.

So:

> lynx http://[FEDC:BA98:7654:3210:FEDC:BA98:7654:3210]:80/index.html

So one _could_ invoke lynx in this way, unless in your current directory, 
there happened to be a subdirectory called:

    http:/

which contained another subdirectory called:

    [0-9A-Za-z:]:80

which contained a file called index.html

This being a fairly pathalogical case I wouldn't worry about it and if
you _are_ worried about it there are always backslashes :-)

Try it yourself:

#include <stdio.h>

int main(int argc, char **argv)
{
    printf("Got \"%s\"\n", argv[1]);
}

Cheers,
Sam.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Sam Manthorpe, SGI.  tel: (650)933-2856 fax: (650)932-2856  [email-masked]
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