47 lines
2.2 KiB
HTML
47 lines
2.2 KiB
HTML
<!DOCTYPE HTML PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.01 Transitional//EN">
|
|
<HTML>
|
|
<HEAD>
|
|
<TITLE>Doc: About Venice Identifiers</TITLE>
|
|
</HEAD>
|
|
|
|
<BODY>
|
|
<H1>About Venice Identifiers</H1>
|
|
<EM>Eric J. Bowersox <<A HREF="mailto:erbo@users.sf.net">erbo@users.sf.net</A>> -
|
|
January 26, 2001</EM><P>
|
|
|
|
Venice identifiers are used for user IDs, community aliases, and conference aliases (and maybe other unique
|
|
identifiers in the future). A valid Venice ID consists of characters from the following character set
|
|
only:
|
|
<UL>
|
|
<LI>Alphanumerics [A-Z, a-z, and 0-9]</LI>
|
|
<LI>Dash [-]</LI>
|
|
<LI>Underscore [_]</LI>
|
|
<LI>Tilde [~]</LI>
|
|
<LI>Asterisk [*]</LI>
|
|
<LI>Apostrophe [']</LI>
|
|
<LI>Dollar sign [$]</LI>
|
|
</UL><P>
|
|
All characters are represented in the ISO 8859-1 character set. Also note that all Venice identifiers
|
|
are case-insensitive.<P>
|
|
<B>Rationale</B><P>
|
|
The character set was defined starting with the list of characters allowable in URL path components
|
|
("pchar" as defined in RFC 2396, section 3.3, page 14), so that Venice IDs would be usable as "path
|
|
information" in a URL.<P>
|
|
The ampersand [&] was eliminated because of its possible confusion with a URL parameter separator, and
|
|
because it requires HTML escaping.<P>
|
|
The at sign [@] was eliminated because of possible confusion with email addresses and Jabber IDs.<P>
|
|
The plus sign [+] was eliminated because of possible confusion with a URL-encoded space character.<P>
|
|
The comma [,] was eliminated because of its possible interpretation as a separator character.<P>
|
|
The equals sign [=] was eliminated because of its possible confusion with a URL parameter/value
|
|
separator.<P>
|
|
The colon [:] was withheld to provide for a possible future "namespace" expansion (as in XML
|
|
namespaces).<P>
|
|
The parentheses [(, )] were eliminated because of possible confusion with user link syntax in
|
|
conferencing.<P>
|
|
The period [.] was eliminated because of possible confusion with post link syntax in conferencing.<P>
|
|
The exclamation point [!] was eliminated because of possible confusion with extended post link syntax in
|
|
conferencing.
|
|
|
|
</BODY>
|
|
</HTML>
|