Should URLs with UTF8 characters be encoded in HTML?

Question

I'm thinking of names and stuff containing accented characters.

E.g.is there a difference between:

<a href="http://example.com/thing?name=forêt">link</a>

and

<a href="http://example.com/thing?name=for%C3%AAt">link</a>

?

Do browsers handle these the same? Or is there some compelling reason to encode these links?

Answer 1

Do browsers handle these the same?

Yes, all (modern) browsers handle these the same. In that all (modern) browsers implicitly URL encode (ie. percent-encode) the URL if you don't explicitly encode this yourself in the HTML source.

In both cases, the browser will implicitly request the percent-encoded URL when a user clicks the link. Select "Copy link address" from the browser's context menu and you copy the percent-encoded URL in both cases. Reading the href attribute of both links using JavaScript returns the percent-encoded URL.

In fact, I believe HTML5 allows unencoded unicode characters:
https://stackoverflow.com/a/19542940/369434

A potential problem might just be "old browsers". How old I don't know. But "old" might just be too old to worry about. (?)

Answer 2

W3C says URLs can only be sent over the Internet using the ASCII character-set. You will need to convert those characters to something. People often replace unsafe characters with their % encoded form. A percent-encoded reference can be found here.

Here is there reference: http://www.w3.org/Addressing/URL/4_URI_Recommentations.html