After an incredibly-long and twisted journey, with oceans of arguments and mountains of examples and endless testing and validation, with contributions from a crowd a people but most of the hauling-up-the-slope due to Roy Fielding (the world thanks him), RFC2396bis is an IETF Internet Standard. Read it here (to hell, I say, with the IETF’s idiotic 66-lines-by-80-column ASCII), and rejoice. There is now actually an official definition of what we mean when we say “URI” and when we say “URL” we really mean “URI” so it applies there too; an official definition, I say, which cleans up the fuzzy spots and goofy spots and absent spots, and on top of all that it’s somewhat human-readable.
