Protocol Action: Uniform Resource Identifiers (URI): Generic Syntax and Semantics to Draft Standard

Note that the HTTP/1.1 specifications as currently drafted have dependencies
on this document.

This dependency is now resolved; as soon as our own interoperability testing
is complete, we will be able to forward our specs for Draft Standard
(previously, we would have had to remove the dependencies, which would
have resulted in duplication between the HTTP/1.1 specs and the URI specs,
which would not have been a good situation.
				- Jim

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The IESG has approved the Internet-Draft 'Uniform Resource Identifiers
(URI): Generic Syntax and Semantics' <draft-fielding-uri-syntax-04.txt>
as a Draft Standard. This has been reviewed in the IETF but is not the
product of an IETF Working Group.

This document updates RFC1808 and RFC1738.

The IESG contact persons are Patrik Faltstrom and Keith Moore.


Technical Summary

This document revises and replaces the generic definitions in RFC 1738 and
RFC 1808. Revision was needed because of last years experience in
implementations of various URL schemes, aswell as the creation of the URN
specification. Clearifications were needed regarding many basic assumptions
in the old documents which was not spelled out explicitely. All significant
changes from the prior RFCs are noted in Appendix G.

Working Group Summary

Discussion has been very intense regarding if the document should be about
URL schemes, or URI schemes. Even when consensus was found on this issue,
it was obvious that various reviewers had different opinions on basic
definitions. Alternative papers were produced, but the discussion converged
to an updated version of this document.

Definitions of functions and methods that can only be applicable to some
URI schemes were also up for debate. Some parties wanted those
(specifically fragments and relative URIs) in separate documents extracted
from this general syntax document, while others claimed a need for
describing not only syntax but also algorithms and methods for for example
calculating the resulting URI from a relative URI existing inside a
document.

The conclusion was at the end that the description of the methods for some
basic algorithms (like relative URIs) should stay in the document because
it can be used in several URI schemes, and in those cases relative URIs
should be the same.


Protocol Quality

Patrik Faltstrom reviewed the specification for IESG.

It has been tested on:

    Mozilla/4.03 [en] (X11; U; SunOS 5.5 sun4u; Nav)
    Lynx/2.7.1 libwww-FM/2.14
    MSIE 3.01; Windows 95
    NCSA_Mosaic/2.6 (X11;SunOS 4.1.2 sun4m) libwww/2.12


RFC Editor:

Please insert the following text as an IESG Note:

This paper describes some kind of "superset" of all functions and methods that
can be applied to URIs. It consists of both a grammar and a description of
basic
functionality for URIs. To understand what is a valid URI, both the grammar
and the apropriate description have to be studied. Also, some functions and
methods described only works in some URI schemes, and some only with
certain content types (i.e. regardless of scheme used).

Received on Tuesday, 11 August 1998 10:31:08 UTC