Hello, I am attempting to write a parser for bip-0021 URI's, including support for the new bip-0072 payment parameters. My goal is absolute correctness. Unfortunately, these BIP's have a few ambiguities and mistakes which ought to be corrected.
First, I would like to point out that internet RFC 3986 governs the general syntax for URI's. It obsoletes RFC 1738 and various other early RFC's. Since RFC 3986 came out in 2005, I think we can agree that any bitcoin URI scheme should use this and not the earlier ones. Unfortunately, bip-0021 never actually mentions RFC 3986, which is a big omission. Even worse, bip-0072 explicitly refers to RFC 1738, which is obsolete. This is a problem, since the old, obsolete standard requires more escapes than are actually necessary. Updating bip-0072 to refer to RFC 3986 instead would allow shorter, more readable bitcoin URI's (things like slashes in payment addresses wouldn't need to be escaped). Secondly, neither of the bip's describe what to do with international characters. I doubt anybody wants to limit the "label" and "message" parameters to 7-bit ASCII, so a character encoding needs to be defined. RFC reccomends that all new URI schemes use UTF-8 as their encoding, which is perfectly reasonable. The bip-0021 standard just needs to actually say so. Finally, there is an error in the bip-0021 BNF grammar, which never mentions the '&' separator between query elements. What is the procedure for getting these BIP's corrected? Submit a pull request with the changes? Hopefully we can all agree that these fixes are useful and necessary. -William P.S. The bitcoin-qt client uses QUrl to parse bitcoin uri's, and that is based on RFC 3986. Thus, the bitcoin-qt client is probably already implementing these suggestions. ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ Subversion Kills Productivity. Get off Subversion & Make the Move to Perforce. With Perforce, you get hassle-free workflows. Merge that actually works. Faster operations. Version large binaries. Built-in WAN optimization and the freedom to use Git, Perforce or both. Make the move to Perforce. http://pubads.g.doubleclick.net/gampad/clk?id=122218951&iu=/4140/ostg.clktrk _______________________________________________ Bitcoin-development mailing list Bitcoin-development@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/bitcoin-development
