IETF Update: Specification for a URI Template

A revised version of the IETF Standards Track Internet Draft "URI Template"has been published. From the abstract: "A URI Template is a compactsequence of characters for describing a range of Uniform ResourceIdentifiers through variable expansion. This specification defines theURI Template syntax and the process for expanding a URI Template intoa URI, along with guidelines for the use of URI Templates on the Internet.
Overview: "A Uniform Resource Identifier (URI) is often used to identifya specific resource within a common space of similar resources... URITemplates provide a mechanism for abstracting a space of resourceidentifiers such that the variable parts can be easily identified anddescribed. URI templates can have many uses, including discovery ofavailable services, configuring resource mappings, defining computed links,specifying interfaces, and other forms of programmatic interaction withresources.
A URI Template provides both a structural description of a URI space and,when variable values are provided, a simple instruction on how to constructa URI corresponding to those values. A URI Template is transformed intoa URI-reference by replacing each delimited expression with its value asdefined by the expression type and the values of variables named withinthe expression. The expression types range from simple value expansionto multiple key=value lists. The expansions are based on the URI genericsyntax, allowing an implementation to process any URI Template withoutknowing the scheme-specific requirements of every possible resulting URI.
A URI Template may be provided in absolute form, as in the examples above,or in relative form if a suitable base URI is defined... A URI Templateis also an IRI template, and the result of template processing can berendered as an IRI by transforming the pct-encoded sequences to theircorresponding Unicode character if the character is not in the reservedset... Parsing a valid URI Template expression does not require buildinga parser from the given ABNF. Instead, the set of allowed characters ineach part of URI Template expression has been chosen to avoid complexparsing, and breaking an expression into its component parts can beachieved by a series of splits of the character string. Example Pythoncode [is planned] that parses a URI Template expression and returns theoperator, argument, and variables as a tuple..."
http://xml.coverpages.org/draft-gregorio-uritemplate-04.txt