query re IPv6 URL format

[Steve Deering]

At 3:37 AM -0700 10/15/97, (Brian E Carpenter) wrote:
> Sadly I believe that only
>
> > 1. Change the textual representation of IPv6 addresses.
>
> will work. The colons kill us.

Changing to some other punctuation character would probably just kill us
somewhere else.  I think it's highly unlikely that we can come up with a
representation that will be transparently compatible with all existing
"grammars" that may encounter IP addresses (e.g., command-line parsers,
configuration file languages, email parsers, ...).

For the URL case in particular, is there not a character or pair of
characters that could be defined as delimiting an IPv6 (or IPv4/6) address
literal, e.g., [aaaa:bbbb::cc:d] or ^aaaa:bbbb::cc:d^ or something similar?
An address plus port number would then look like [aaaa:bbbb::cc:d]:8080.

Steve