[Python-Dev] Python-3.0, unicode, and os.environ

Fri Dec 12 10:11:09 CET 2008

* Adam Olsen wrote: 
> UTF-8 in percent encodings is becoming a defacto standard. Otherwise
> the browser has to display the percent escapes in the address bar,
> rather than the intended text.

Duh! The address bar should contain the URL, which *is* the intended text. 
The escapes are there for a reason. If I pass some octets using percent 
escapes via the query string or request body, it's not text, not even 
intended. It's still a collection of octets. Translating them back (and 
forth when I press enter in the address bar) is a pretty ambigious 
operation and therefore pretty wrong.
The defacto standard does not exist. There's a real one instead: RFC 2396.
nd