Re: Permitting non-indirect links

lee@sq.com wrote:
> > [Martin Bryan]
> > What is at question is whether pre-decomposition
> > would offer any advantages. I'm not certain it does, but I want these point
> > to be seriously thought about [...]
>
> It doesn't.
>
> Note that a URL is actually a scheme identifier and then an opaque string.
> Some schemes are names of network protocols (e.g. http, ftp) and some are
> not (e.g. mailto).
> [...]
> The only valid breakdown is
>     type: URL
>     scheme: http
>     opaque string: //www.sq.cm/cgi-bin/pcdocs/introduction.html

However, for some schemes the selector is not _completely_ opaque.
For any scheme that uses the "generic-RL" format defined in RFC 1808
"Relative Uniform Resource Locators" (including http:, ftp:, file:,
and, I think, gopher:), user agents can decompose the selector into
network location, path, parameters, and query components; and the
path component can be further decomposed by splitting it at each '/'
character.

I think that the Formal System Identifier definition was also
designed to support relative locations in a way that's compatible
with relative URLs (viz. the SOIBase attribute).

Martin, would it serve your needs if instead of providing a
mechanism for specifying URL components separately, XML
allowed system identifiers to be specified relative to
some base identifier, a la FSIs or the HTML3/HTML+ "base"
attribute?


--Joe English

  jenglish@crl.com

Received on Sunday, 19 January 1997 15:15:54 UTC