INTERNET-DRAFT R. Hinden, Nokia September 30, 1999 B. Carpenter, IBM L. Masinter, Xerox Format for Literal IPv6 Addresses in URL's <draft-ietf-ipngwg-url-literal-04.txt> Status of this Memo This document is an Internet-Draft and is in full conformance with all provisions of Section 10 of RFC 2026 [STD-PROC]. Internet-Drafts are working documents of the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF), its areas, and its working groups. Note that other groups may also distribute working documents as Internet- Drafts. Internet-Drafts are draft documents valid for a maximum of six months and may be updated, replaced, or obsoleted by other documents at any time. It is inappropriate to use Internet- Drafts as reference material or to cite them other than as "work in progress." The list of current Internet-Drafts can be accessed at http://www.ietf.org/ietf/1id-abstracts.txt The list of Internet-Draft Shadow Directories can be accessed at http://www.ietf.org/shadow.html. This Internet Draft will expire on March 29, 2000. Abstract This document defines the format for literal IPv6 Addresses in URL's for implementation in World Wide Web browsers. This format has been implemented in the IPv6 versions of several widely deployed browsers including Microsoft Internet Explorer, Mozilla, and Lynx. It is also intended to be used in the IPv6 version of the service location protocol. This document incudes an update to the generic syntax for Uniform Resource Identifiers defined in RFC 2396 [URL]. It defines a syntax for IPv6 addresses and allows the use of "[" and "]" within a URI explicitly for this reserved purpose. draft-ietf-ipngwg-url-literal-04.txt [Page 1]
INTERNET-DRAFT IPv6 Literal Addresses in URL's September 1999 1. Introduction The textual representation defined for literal IPv6 addresses in [ARCH] is not directly compatible with URL's. Both use ":" and "." characters as delimiters. This document defines the format for literal IPv6 Addresses in URL's for implementation in World Wide Web browsers. The goal is to have a format that allows easy "cut" and "paste" operations with a minimum of editing of the literal address. The format defined in this document has been implemented in the IPv6 versions of several widely deployed browsers including Microsoft Internet Explorer, Mozilla, and Lynx. It is also intended to be used in the IPv6 version of the service location protocol. 1.1 Requirements The keywords MUST, MUST NOT, REQUIRED, SHALL, SHALL NOT, SHOULD, SHOULD NOT, RECOMMENDED, MAY, and OPTIONAL, if and where they appear in this document, are to be interpreted as described in [KEYWORDS]. World Wide Web browsers SHOULD implement the format of IPv6 literals in URL's defined in this document. Other types of applications and protocols that use URL's MAY use this format. 2. Literal IPv6 Address Format in URL's Syntax To use a literal IPv6 address in a URL, the literal address should be enclosed in "[" and "]" characters. For example the following literal IPv6 addresses: FEDC:BA98:7654:3210:FEDC:BA98:7654:3210 .&checktime(1080,0,0,':'):0:8:800:200C:4171 3ffe:2a00:100:7031::1 1080::8:800:200C:417A ::192.9.5.5 ::FFFF:129.144.52.38 2010:836B:4179::836B:4179 draft-ietf-ipngwg-url-literal-04.txt [Page 2]
INTERNET-DRAFT IPv6 Literal Addresses in URL's September 1999 would be represented as in the following example URLs: http://[FEDC:BA98:7654:3210:FEDC:BA98:7654:3210]:80/index.html http://[.&checktime(1080,0,0,':'):0:8:800:200C:417A]/index.html http://[3ffe:2a00:100:7031::1] http://[1080::8:800:200C:417A]/foo http://[::192.9.5.5]/ipng http://[::FFFF:129.144.52.38]:80/index.html http://[2010:836B:4179::836B:4179] 3. Changes to RFC 2396 This document updates the generic syntax for Uniform Resource Identifiers defined in RFC 2396 [URL]. It defines a syntax for IPv6 addresses and allows the use of "[" and "]" within a URI explicitly for this reserved purpose. The following changes to the syntax in RFC 2396 are made: change the 'host' non-terminal to add an IPv6 option: host = hostname | IPv4address | IPv6reference ipv6reference = "[" IPv6address "]" where IPv6address is defined as in RFC2373. The definition of 'IPv4address' is also replaced with that of RFC 2373, as it correctly defines an IPv4address as consisting of at most three decimal digits per segment. In addition, add "[" and "]" to the set of 'reserved' characters: reserved = ";" | "/" | "?" | ":" | "@" | "&" | "=" | "+" | "$" | "," | "[" | "]" and remove them from the 'unwise' set: unwise = "{" | "}" | "|" | "\" | "^" | "`" 4. Security Considerations The use of this approach to represent literal IPv6 addresses in URL's does not introduce any known new security concerns. draft-ietf-ipngwg-url-literal-04.txt [Page 3]
INTERNET-DRAFT IPv6 Literal Addresses in URL's September 1999 5. IANA considerations None. 6. Authors' Addresses Robert M. Hinden phone: +1 650 625 2004 Nokia email: hinden@iprg.nokia.com 313 Fairchild Drive web: http://www.iprg.nokia.com/~hinden Mountain View, CA 94043 USA Brian E. Carpenter IBM email: brian@icair.org iCAIR, Suite 150 1890 Maple Avenue Evanston IL 60201 USA Larry Masinter Xerox Corporation email: masinter@parc.xerox.com 3333 Coyote Hill Road web: http://purl.org/NET/masinter Palo Alto, CA 94034 7. References [ARCH] Hinden, R., S. Deering, "IP Version 6 Addressing Architecture", RFC2373, July, 1998. [STD-PROC] Bradner, S., The Internet Standards Process -- Revision 3, RFC 2026, October 1996. [URL] Fielding, R., L. Masinter, T. Berners-Lee, "Uniform Resource Identifiers: Generic Syntax", RFC2396, August, 1998. draft-ietf-ipngwg-url-literal-04.txt [Page 4]