41 lines
2.1 KiB
Markdown
41 lines
2.1 KiB
Markdown
# TEMPORARY NOTES
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(to be moved elsewhere)
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## Amsterdam Identifier Values
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Amsterdam identifier values are used for user names, community aliases, and conference aliases, and may be used
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for other purposes in the future. A valid Amsterdam ID consists of characters from the following character set:
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* Alphanumerics (A-Z, a-z, 0-9)
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* Dash (-)
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* Underscore (_)
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* Tilde (~)
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* Asterisk (*)
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* Apostrophe (')
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* Dollar sign ($)
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All characters are represented in the ISO 8859-1 character set, and may be represented with single-byte encoding
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in UTF-8. Also note that all Amsterdam identifiers are case-insensitive.
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### Rationale
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The character set was defined starting with the list of characters allowable in URL path components ("pchar" as
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defined in [RFC 3986](https://www.rfc-editor.org/rfc/rfc3986.txt), section 3.3, page 23), minus the percent-encoded
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forms, so that Amsterdam identifiers would be usable as "path information" in a URL.
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From here, various characters were excluded:
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* The ampersand (&) was excluded because of its possible confusion with a URL parameter separator, and because it requires HTML escaping.
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* The at sign (@) was excluded because of possible confusion with E-mail addresses and XMPP identifiers.
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* The plus sign (+) was excluded because of possible confusion with a URL-encoded space character.
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* The comma (,) was excluded because of its possible interpretation as a separator character.
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* The equals sign (=) was excluded because of its possible confusion with a URL parameter/value separator.
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* The semicolon (;) was excluded because of its possible interpretation as a separator character.
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* The colon (:) was withheld to provide for a possible future "namespace" expansion (as in XML namespaces).
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* The parentheses ((, )) were excluded because of possible confusion with user link syntax in conferencing.
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* The period (.) was excluded because of possible confusion with post link syntax in conferencing.
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* The exclamation point (!) was excluded because of possible confusion with extended post link syntax in conferencing.
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The definition of Amsterdam identifiers was taken almost directly from the definition of Venice identifiers in the predecessor project.
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