[cosmo-dev] Bug 11175: : in username causes chaos

[Brian Moseley]

On Nov 26, 2007 2:34 PM, Mike Taylor <bear at code-bear.com> wrote:

> Remember that work is proceeding on allowing UTF-8 in URI's (to be
> called IRI):
>
>         http://www.w3.org/International/O-URL-and-ident.html

I should have realized that mentioning URL-safe characters would cause
confusion ;)

the only real reason to care about URL-safe characters in usernames is
if we plan to document well-known templates for URLs containing
usernames. we do this for "hierarchical" dav URLs, but we discourage
the usage of those URLs, preferring that folks use URLs that directly
address items and collections by UUID. and even then, it doesn't
matter unless we care about people being able to type unencoded unsafe
characters by hand into, say, browser location bars.

it would have been more precise for me to write  "ASCII alphanumerics
and a handful of other ASCII characters that are not known to cause
problems in general web-related usage".

however, after a trip to the grocery store and some time to let my
brane clear, I'm going to change my mind and go back on that
statement. UTF-8 usernames are much too cool of a feature to spoil
because of an oversight in an old specification that makes one
character unusable. let's just forbid colon (and any other problematic
characters, if we find less than a handful) and move on.