Posted by John Dunlop on 10/14/06 08:05

dorayme:

> What mangling are you talking about?

Mangling URLs by percent-encoding octets that could have remained as
raw data.

| For consistency, percent-encoded octets in the ranges
| of ALPHA (%41-%5A and %61-%7A), DIGIT (%30-%39),
| hyphen (%2D), period (%2E), underscore (%5F), or tilde
| (%7E) should not be created by URI producers and, when
| found in a URI, should be decoded to their corresponding
| unreserved characters by URI normalizers.

(RFC3986 : 2.3)

Two conditions:

1. Unreserved characters should not be percent-encoded.
2. If found, they should be decoded.

E-mail address obfuscation that percent-encodes the octets of
unreserved characters runs afoul of (1). And if 'global transcription'
is a consideration, anyone who obfuscates their address in this way
relies on (2).

> If so, who besides alt.html types will it seem so unprofessional to?

Anyone, I'd imagine, faced with a URL chock full of %xx. If it hasn't
yet been decoded.

--
Jock

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