Re: same-document references

* Boris Zbarsky wrote:
>Given that, it sounds like for my purposes this part of the spec is 
>entirely vacuous (also useless, since in practice other specs need to 
>define the details of the behavior here), so I'm just going to ignore it 
>and work on making sure other specs actually define their behavior 
>instead of relying on assumptions about what "base URI" should be used here.

As with any other interface you need to be clear in how you use it. I'm
not even sure what the problem here really is, it seems common sense to
me that you resolve internal references internally without new external
retrievals, and even if you don't, RFC 3986 does not stop you if you do
understand the implications and have good reasons.

I would have thought that the problem would actually be the definion of
what is a same-document reference to begin with, that has changed with
RFC 3986 and has caused confusion in the past, namely between people who
think they can specify base references to shorten references, and people
who want to move content between contexts without changing references.

One problem there is that if you have http://example.org/ with

  ...
  <thing id='example' />
  ...
  <context base='http://example.com/'>
    <ref href='#example' />
  </context>

You might now say all of (under various, possibly wrong, assumptions)

  * <thing> is at http://example.org/#example
  * <ref> refers to http://example.com/#example
  * <ref> is a same-document reference

Which some might find contradictory. The second statement is the most
interesting if you think about how you would rewrite the document so
all the base references are removed. But these issue arise long before
"When a same-document reference is dereferenced for a retrieval action".

In any case, this would be better discussed on the uri@w3.org list as
changes to RFC 3986 are out of scope of the IRI Working Group, and we
really should move, here and there, to a model where we get bug reports
like "With this complete and self-contained example, I think RFC XXXX
says $x but due to $y I think it should say $z instead" ...
-- 
Björn Höhrmann · mailto:bjoern@hoehrmann.de · http://bjoern.hoehrmann.de
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Received on Saturday, 2 July 2011 23:51:33 UTC