Escape identifiers

[tmaier]

According to https://github.com/interagent/http-api-design#support-non-id-dereferencing-for-convenience we can provide non-id identifiers for convenience.

This could be essentially everything.
I could for example query for a standard, say /standards/ISO 9000:2005 (/standards/ISO%209000:2005)

I propose to run URI.escape on every identifier passed to the api.

[schneems]

That link no longer works, here's a good one that is locked to a commit:
https://github.com/interagent/http-api-design/blob/193f6eeee57d69121af82e74cce457ad8f03e5b4/en/requests/support-non-id-dereferencing-for-convenience.md

Here's the entire contents:

#### Support non-id dereferencing for convenience

In some cases it may be inconvenient for end-users to provide IDs to
identify a resource. For example, a user may think in terms of a Heroku
app name, but that app may be identified by a UUID. In these cases you
may want to accept both an id or name, e.g.:

```bash
$ curl https://service.com/apps/{app_id_or_name}
$ curl https://service.com/apps/97addcf0-c182
$ curl https://service.com/apps/www-prod
```

Do not accept only names to the exclusion of IDs.

I view this statement as a bug report

I could for example query for a standard, say /standards/ISO 9000:2005 (/standards/ISO%209000:2005)

If an ID or artifact has non-valid url parts it makes sense that this library could handle escaping them. My worry here is if anyone is abusing the existing behavior to force something like this:

$ curl https://service.com/apps/{www-prod/dynos/web}

Even though this might not be "supported" or "valid" use, it might accidentally be used that way and uri escaping would be backward incompatible. I would want to ask how we could detect on such cases and warn or provide some sort of a stable opt-out interface etc.

Follow up question: Is there a way to quickly generate and show URLs are or are-not-uri-escaped currently? This issue is very old and I'm assuming the behavior you're describing still exists but I currently don't have a way to verify it.