Re: issue-dbooth-9c: Base URI should only be required if needed

Booth, David (HP Software - Boston) wrote:
> This is a personal comment -- not on behalf of HP.  
> 
> As illustrated in the pipelining example at
> http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/public-grddl-comments/2007AprJun/006
> 9.html
> it is important that GRDDL also work for XML documents.  Hence, the spec
> should be clear that the lack of a base URI is only a problem if it is
> needed (to resolve a relative URI) but not present.   I.e., correct and
> complete GRDDL results should still be produced if there is no base URI
> but all transformation tokens are absolute URI.
> 
> This is not currently clear in the spec.  In fact, the informative
> "Mechanical Rules" seem to suggest that a base URI is always required in
> order to produce GRDDL results.  

It's an arbitrary decision whether to consider a base URI
to be intrinsic to an XML document or extrinsic. That
is
   <doc1/> based at http://example/1
and
   <doc1/> based at http://example/2
can be considered 2 distinct XML documents or 2 copies
of on XML document. GRDDL follows the Infoset
spec in considering the base URI to be intrinsic to an
XML document, so those are distinct XML documents.
So formally, the base URI is always there.

In practice, how you navigate all the relevant
specs (HTTP, URI, ...) to find that base URI turns
out to be fairly subtle. We have a number of fairly
tricky cases worked out as test cases, and as a result,
we're considering some clarifying text. See

  progress on documenting base
  http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/public-grddl-wg/2007May/0088.html



> Here are some places in the spec where this comes up:
> http://www.w3.org/TR/grddl/#rule_GRDDL_transformation
> http://www.w3.org/TR/grddl/#rule_tlrel
> http://www.w3.org/TR/grddl/#rule_metadata_profile_name
> 
> Thanks
> 
> David Booth, Ph.D.
> HP Software
> +1 617 629 8881 office  |  dbooth@hp.com
> http://www.hp.com/go/software


-- 
Dan Connolly, W3C http://www.w3.org/People/Connolly/

Received on Wednesday, 30 May 2007 16:26:33 UTC