Question About Link Format

[Solderpunk]

On Fri Jul 17, 2020 at 11:21 AM CEST, Ben wrote:
> Hello guys, I am not normally one to get involved in the Gemini spec. I
> got into a discussion with Martin about how UTF-8 characters are
> supposed to be handled in links in Gemini documents.
>
> On my site I have a link in a document like this:
>
> => logarion/taĝikio--lando-montara.gmi Taĝikio: Lando Montara
>
> This refers locally to the actual file name on the disk. The main
> question is, is this allowed in Gemini documents? I thought this should
> work because I believe that Gemini is UTF-8 native or by default, and my
> Unix file system (in this case FreeBSD UFS) appears to be in agreement.

Aaah, I figured we were going to have to deal with this sooner or later.
This has been one of those few remaining unpleasant details in the back
of my mind that I know needs to get sorted out.  It's because of the
existence of things like this that I'm so averse to adding anything new
to the spec - it runs the risk of introducing more things like this,
which aren't obvious at first but then come up only after a few months
of use.

The spec currently uses language like "UTF-8 encoded absolute URL" which
I have to admit has been there since the very earliest version and which
I wrote without any kind of deeper awareness of how this intersected
with existing RFCs.  I've since come to realise that it's very possible
that this language is potentially ambiguous at best, and contradictory
at worse.

I suspect this is going to need a bit of reading and thinking to come up
with a clear stance on and to make appropriate changes on the spec...

> It does seem a proper URI should best contain %C4%9D in place of ĝ, but
> the question is whether I should change it in the document? Does the
> internal linking (in my case the link is local/relative) even count as a
> URI?

It definitely counts as a relative URI.

Cheers,
Solderpunk