3 ms·

There are issues with using `:` in an URL, if you plan on using the URL in a way that's compatible with the extant software out there. I remember: - I remember

by hosh 10y ago

There are issues with using `:` in an URL, if you plan on using the URL in a way that's compatible with the extant software out there. I remember: - I remember the Rails community trying to use `;` which broke Mongrel 1. Mongrel's parser was generated from the RFC. There was a huge flame war about that back in the day. The Rails core team at the time thought that Mongrel should make an exception to a reserved character. (And after all was said and done, it got changed back to `/` for that particular use-case). - When working on IPv6 support about 3 years ago, one of the things I added to an open source Ruby project was IPv6 literals into the URL. This was a case of using `:`. Even though this was defined in the RFC specifying the literal, I found out at that time the Ruby standard library was written in a way that assumes you would never have `:` in the URL other than to delimit the port. I ended up having to do some workarounds for that. That's with Ruby. I wouldn't be surprised if many other extant libraries parsing URLs that might break -- at least not without escaping those characters. See: https://perishablepress.com/stop-using-unsafe-characters-in-urls/ https://perishablepress.com/stop-using-unsafe-characters-in-... You don't NEED ":". You NEED some sort of delimiter that can clearly distinguish between database and dataset; you happen to pick ':' to satisfy that. There might be a different delimiter that works better. The other option is to not pretend that is a URL and call that something else. Post-script: I think this project is a great idea. I'm looking forward to see how it turns out.

hosh 10y ago
And just to be clear on this: the `::` might not be a big deal if it happens after the `/` delimiter specifying the host part. So: http://localhost:8000::dataset http://localhost:8000::dataset may break code that tries to discern the host name. However: http://localhost:8000/::dataset http://localhost:8000/::dataset Might not. Further, you could also reserve `_` in your scheme to refer to the default database: http://localhost:8000/_::dataset http://localhost:8000/_::dataset But as I mentioned in my previous reply, there may be unintended consequences. If this is something you guys want to do (and have HTTP/HTTPS URL compatibility) to check it out on different language/platform and see if your scheme breaks things. (And definitely see if Windows library assumes this; Windows file paths uses `:` as a reserved character)
- arekkas 10y ago
  why break something that's already solved a gazillion times. go open standards, don't create your own.
iso-8859-1 10y ago
Java breaks: groovy -e "new URL('http://localhost:8000::people')" http://localhost:8000::people')" Caught: java.net.MalformedURLException Python breaks: >>> urlparse('http://localhost:8000::people' http://localhost:8000::people') ParseResult(scheme='http', netloc='localhost:8000::people', path='', params='', query='', fragment='')

by hosh 10y ago

hosh 10y ago

And just to be clear on this: the `::` might not be a big deal if it happens after the `/` delimiter specifying the host part. So: http://localhost:8000::dataset http://localhost:8000::dataset may break code that tries to discern the host name. However: http://localhost:8000/::dataset http://localhost:8000/::dataset Might not. Further, you could also reserve `_` in your scheme to refer to the default database: http://localhost:8000/_::dataset http://localhost:8000/_::dataset But as I mentioned in my previous reply, there may be unintended consequences. If this is something you guys want to do (and have HTTP/HTTPS URL compatibility) to check it out on different language/platform and see if your scheme breaks things. (And definitely see if Windows library assumes this; Windows file paths uses `:` as a reserved character)

arekkas 10y ago
why break something that's already solved a gazillion times. go open standards, don't create your own.

iso-8859-1 10y ago

Java breaks: groovy -e "new URL('http://localhost:8000::people')" http://localhost:8000::people')" Caught: java.net.MalformedURLException Python breaks: >>> urlparse('http://localhost:8000::people' http://localhost:8000::people') ParseResult(scheme='http', netloc='localhost:8000::people', path='', params='', query='', fragment='')