rfc3986

I tried to find this in the relevant RFC, IETF RFC 3986 , but couldn't figure it. Do URIs for HTTP allow Unicode, or non-ASCII of any kind? Can you please cite the section and the RFC that supports your answer. NB: For those who might think this is not programming related - it is. It's related to an ISAPI filter I'm building. Addendum I've read section 2.5 of RFC 3986. But RFC 2616, which I believe is the current HTTP protocol, predates 3986, and for that reason I'd suppose it cannot be compliant with 3986. Furthermore, even if or when the HTTP RFC is updated, there still will be the issue of

I have a question regarding URLs: I've read the RFC 3986 and still have a question about one URL: If a URI contains an authority component, then the path component must either be empty or begin with a slash ("/") character. If a URI does not contain an authority component, then the path cannot begin with two slash characters ("//"). In addition, a URI reference (Section 4.1) may be a relative-path reference, in which case the first path segment cannot contain a colon (":") character. The ABNF requires five separate rules to disambiguate these cases, only one of which will match the path

The RFC 3986 URI: Generic Syntax spec lists a semicolon as a reserved (sub-delim) character: reserved = gen-delims / sub-delims gen-delims = ":" / "/" / "?" / "#" / "[" / "]" / "@" sub-delims = "!" / "$" / "&" / "'" / "(" / ")" / "*" / "+" / "," / ";" / "=" What is the reserved purpose of the ";" of the semicolon in URIs? For that matter, what is the purpose of the other sub-delims (I'm only aware of purposes for "&", "+", and "=")? There is an explanation at the end of section 3.3. Aside from dot-segments in hierarchical paths, a path segment is considered opaque by the generic syntax. URI