Comments on format and type of path in Module File Format Specification

[Mike Duigou]

The description for SubSectionFileHeader::path in the current module file format [1] seems fairly close to URI Relative Reference [2] but the typing description for path somewhat ambiguous. Declaring the path to be a URI may offer benefits for more predictable resolution as well as specified forms for normalization/canonicalization.

Additionally the path is in currently declared as "modified Java UTF-8" but no normalization/canonicalization is discussed. The use of modified UTF-8 seems unnecessary since a length is provided. I understand that it is likely modified UTF-8 because it's convenient for String written with DataOutputStream and because other Java formats (notably the class file format) also use the modified variant of UTF-8. None of this would be relevant if path is an encoded URI as the charset would be US-ASCII.

Mike

[1] http://cr.openjdk.java.net/~mr/jigsaw/notes/module-file-format/
[2] http://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc3986#section-4.2