Re: URI versus URI Reference

John Cowan wrote:

> "Paul W. Abrahams" wrote:
>
> > RFC 1738 speaks only of URLs, not URIs.  So it provides no answer to the question
> > ``What, exactly, is a URI''.  And RFC 2396 says, at the end of the first paragraph of
> > the Abstract, ``it revises and ***replaces*** the generic definitions in RFC 1738 and
> > RFC 1808''.
>
> However, the *specific* syntax of individual URI schemes (and the syntax of URIs
> is the union of those syntaxes) in RFC 1738 is *not* overridden.

Hmm.  Are you asserting that the intent of RFC 2396 to limit the potential schemes to
those enumerated in RFC 1738 (which never utters the acronym URI anyway)?  The approach of
RFC 2396 seems to be (Sec. 3.2) to define how all of this works for arbitrary schemes that
satisfy a certain syntax.

> That's why
> the RFC header says "Updates 1738,1808" instead of "Supersedes 1738,1808".

It says that.  And it also says, in the first paragraph of the abstract, that it revises
and replaces the generic definitions in RFC 1738 and RFC 1808.   So what is one to make of
that?   I'd say that "replaces" explains what "updates" means.  But even if you disagree
with that, I think you'd agree that there are two different statements here with possibly
two different meanings.

Paul Abrahams

Received on Thursday, 25 May 2000 14:24:09 UTC