bip-0021 and bip-0072 ambiguities & mistakes

Hello, I am attempting to write a parser for bip-0021 URI's, including support for the new bip-0072 payment parameters. My goal is absolute correctness. Unfortunately, these BIP's have a few ambiguities and mistakes which ought to be corrected.

First, I would like to point out that internet RFC 3986 governs the general syntax for URI's. It obsoletes RFC 1738 and various other early RFC's. Since RFC 3986 came out in 2005, I think we can agree that any bitcoin URI scheme should use this and not the earlier ones.

Unfortunately, bip-0021 never actually mentions RFC 3986, which is a big omission. Even worse, bip-0072 explicitly refers to RFC 1738, which is obsolete. This is a problem, since the old, obsolete standard requires more escapes than are actually necessary. Updating bip-0072 to refer to RFC 3986 instead would allow shorter, more readable bitcoin URI's (things like slashes in payment addresses wouldn't need to be escaped).

Secondly, neither of the bip's describe what to do with international characters. I doubt anybody wants to limit the "label" and "message" parameters to 7-bit ASCII, so a character encoding needs to be defined. RFC reccomends that all new URI schemes use UTF-8 as their encoding, which is perfectly reasonable. The bip-0021 standard just needs to actually say so.

Finally, there is an error in the bip-0021 BNF grammar, which never mentions the '&' separator between query elements.

What is the procedure for getting these BIP's corrected? Submit a pull request with the changes? Hopefully we can all agree that these fixes are useful and necessary.

-William

P.S. The bitcoin-qt client uses QUrl to parse bitcoin uri's, and that is based on RFC 3986. Thus, the bitcoin-qt client is probably already implementing these suggestions.

Yes please, pull req would be great! I also noticed that escaping doesn't seem to be necessary, and the resultant de-escaped QRcodes are certainly much nicer! Thanks!

On Thu, Mar 6, 2014 at 2:59 PM, Mike Hearn <mike@plan99•net> wrote:

> Yes please, pull req would be great! I also noticed that escaping doesn't
> seem to be necessary, and the resultant de-escaped QRcodes are certainly
> much nicer! Thanks!

All right, I have submitted the pull request. Hopefully, the specified behavior now corresponds more closely to what the bitcoin-qt client is actually doing, and to what the RFC recommends.

-William