[Cosmo-dev] Allowable Characters in Cosmo Usernames

[Brian Moseley]

On 5/17/06, Todd Agulnick <todd at agulnick.com> wrote:

> - According to http://www.faqs.org/rfcs/rfc2396.html, non-ASCII
> characters in URI's have to be encoded & escaped in some way. I would
> assume that this means encoding as UTF-8. Is that correct?

that's my understanding.

> We've already specifically ruled out "/", but what about the rest? Are
> they acceptable in usernames? Do they have to be escaped? Will
> http://cosmo-demo.osafoundation.org/home/mycrazyusername@here&there?/file.txt
> work?

they're acceptable now, but anywhere cosmo constructs a home directory
url, the generated url will probably be broken. you caught me not
doing my homework :)

i'm on the fence regarding these characters. we can certainly allow
them and make sure we're correctly escaping them when building urls
ourselves, but we rely on people and other programs to also do this
when they construct cosmo urls. i'm worried more about people typing
things into their browser's location box than i am other programs.

in the spirit of being as permissive as possible, however, it might be
okay for us to explicitly allow all of these characters, including
'/', and field any support questions that might come up from
mycrazyusername at here&there.