Re: Heads-up re: IPv6 addresses in URLs (from IPng-WG minutes)

Koen Holtman (koen@win.tue.nl)
Mon, 12 Jan 1998 21:52:21 +0100 (MET) 

Jeffrey Mogul:
>
>I was skimming the minutes of the IPng WG from the Washington, DC IETF
>meeting, and found this:
>
>[Start of excerpt]
[...deleted...]
>    changed it is very likely to be sufficient.  Recommend that the
>    primary preferred syntax for IPv6 addresses in URL's be:
>    
>      http://[ABCD.EF01::2345:6789]:80/
>    
>    The IPv6 address should be enclosed in brackets.  URL parsers that
>    can not support this notation can either support the proposed
>    alternative syntax:
>    
>      http://--ABCD-EF12-192.100.1.2.ipv6:80/
>    
>    or not allow IPv6 addresses to be entered directly.
>
>[End of excerpt]
>
>I'm not sure if this is really an "issue" for HTTP/1.1, but I suspect
>that the IESG will want to be sure that HTTP/1.1 syntax is compatible
>with IPv6, and if there are conflicts, we should probably make sure
>they are addressed.  Or make an explicit statement that we are not
>going to address them in this version of the protocol (and why not).

I remember that we had a discussion about ipv6 urls some time ago on
www-talk, see for example the thread starting with

http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/www-talk/1996JulAug/0093.html

It was noted in that thread that [ and ] were illegal in URLs.

We did not really reach a consensus, but one intermediate conclusion
was that a notation like

 http://1080::8:800:200C:417A.8000/blah

with the . separating the address from the port number, would do the
trick.  I see however that you quoted some ipv6 addresses which have a
. in them above, I think we assumed at the time that the ipv6 notation
would use : only. 

Anyway, this is probably an issue between the ipv6 people and whoever
feels responsible for maintaining URLs (Larry(?)).  I am just
providing some pointers.  I think we should at least add a note to the
1.1 spec to warn implementers of this issue.

>-Jeff

Koen.