2001-01-31 13:48:40 -07:00
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<TITLE>Doc: About Venice Identifiers</TITLE>
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<H1>About Venice Identifiers</H1>
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2006-01-25 21:40:34 -07:00
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<EM>Eric J. Bowersox <<A HREF="mailto:erbo@users.sf.net">erbo@users.sf.net</A>> -
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2001-01-31 13:48:40 -07:00
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January 26, 2001</EM><P>
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2001-11-07 01:43:09 -07:00
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Venice identifiers are used for user IDs, community aliases, and conference aliases (and maybe other unique
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identifiers in the future). A valid Venice ID consists of characters from the following character set
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only:
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<UL>
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<LI>Alphanumerics [A-Z, a-z, and 0-9]</LI>
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<LI>Dash [-]</LI>
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<LI>Underscore [_]</LI>
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<LI>Tilde [~]</LI>
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<LI>Asterisk [*]</LI>
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<LI>Apostrophe [']</LI>
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<LI>Dollar sign [$]</LI>
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</UL><P>
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All characters are represented in the ISO 8859-1 character set. Also note that all Venice identifiers
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are case-insensitive.<P>
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<B>Rationale</B><P>
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The character set was defined starting with the list of characters allowable in URL path components
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("pchar" as defined in RFC 2396, section 3.3, page 14), so that Venice IDs would be usable as "path
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information" in a URL.<P>
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The ampersand [&] was eliminated because of its possible confusion with a URL parameter separator, and
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because it requires HTML escaping.<P>
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The at sign [@] was eliminated because of possible confusion with email addresses and Jabber IDs.<P>
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The plus sign [+] was eliminated because of possible confusion with a URL-encoded space character.<P>
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The comma [,] was eliminated because of its possible interpretation as a separator character.<P>
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The equals sign [=] was eliminated because of its possible confusion with a URL parameter/value
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separator.<P>
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The colon [:] was withheld to provide for a possible future "namespace" expansion (as in XML
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namespaces).<P>
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The parentheses [(, )] were eliminated because of possible confusion with user link syntax in
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conferencing.<P>
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The period [.] was eliminated because of possible confusion with post link syntax in conferencing.<P>
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The exclamation point [!] was eliminated because of possible confusion with extended post link syntax in
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conferencing.
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