URI equivalence and query parameter sequence

• From: Darrel Miller <darrel@tavis.ca>
• Date: Mon, 11 Jul 2011 17:18:04 +0000
• To: <ietf-http-wg@w3.org>
• Message-ID: <076601cc3fee$6166b8b0$24342a10$@tavis.ca>

To get to the point, I would like to know if the following two URIs can be
considered equivalent.

   http://example.org/location?x=34&y=67

    http://example.org/location?y=67&x=34

The HTTP spec refers to RFC 3986 for rules on normalization and comparison.
In RFC3986, it does discuss the use of "syntax based normalization"
(http://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc3986#section-6) but makes no mention of query
parameters.

It is my understanding (and quite possibly incorrect) that ordering of query
parameters is not significant to most server implementations.  Is there any
official opinion on this?  Is it reasonable to consider these two URIs as
accessing the same resource? Or should I redirect one URI to the other?

Thanks,

Darrel Miller

Received on Monday, 11 July 2011 20:47:08 UTC