Some comments to what Bruce mentioned about the xml:base fixup ...

Some comments to what Bruce mentioned about Appendix A, ...

> <brich> ambiguity starts with "relative URI" in section 2.4

http://www.ietf.org/rfc/rfc3986.txt answers that as follows:
>     NOTE: Previous specifications used the terms "partial URI" and
>     "relative URI" to denote a relative reference to a URI.  As some
>     readers misunderstood those terms to mean that relative URIs are a
>     subset of URIs rather than a method of referencing URIs, this
>     specification simply refers to them as relative references.

I hence disagree that this is ambiguous, however propose to change the
term relative URI to relative references being defined in RFC 3986
section 4.2.  "Relative Reference" .

> <brich> e.g., is //.. a relative URI?

yes it's a relative uri reference, and it's authority is ".." and it's
path and everything that follows is empty.

It's relative, because the scheme component would be inherited from the
base URI.

> do I apply slash-reduction to http://foo?

No, unless it is your path component in for example "http://bar/http://foo?"

This however would not bother us with xml:base as the there is no chance
to express this as a relative reference having a base URI of "http://bar".

... Unless you do the slash reduction in the first place and the
relative reference would then be "http:/foo?".

I doubt however that someone would actually ever do something like this
in a real life scenario.

Also note that the slash reduction in Appendix A is just as step E. in
RFC 3986 section 5.2.4.  "Remove Dot Segments" is only applied to the
parsed path of a URI reference and hence would never harm the scheme or
authority part of a URI nor a network-path matching the following
nonterminal.

relative-part = "//" authority path-abempty

So maybe a better name for "network-path reference" would be just
"network-reference" as the path starts after the authority if any.

What will however be done is that a network-reference would inherit the
scheme of some base URI (cf. T.scheme = Base.scheme; in RFC 3986,
section 5.2.2.  "Transform References").


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