Re: NEW ISSUE: Action defaults don't work with URNs.

Jonathan,

On Fri, Jan 14, 2005 at 12:37:08PM -0800, Jonathan Marsh wrote:
> However, slash isn't allowed as a path component by all URI schemes.
> Notably, URNs don't allow slash as far as I can tell, and you often see
> paths delimited by ":" instead.

Yes, this is generally regarded as a bug with URNs; that they don't
use the hierarchical capabilities of the generic URI syntax to denote
hierarchy.  I personally don't think it's worth introducing a lot of
complexity to accomodate a broken and little-used (not to mention
non-dereferencable) URI scheme, and so would personally opt for option
"a".  YMMV, of course.

Another option would be to declare a "separator" character which
defaulted to "/", but could be set to ":" for URNs.

And FWIW, I think option b) is actively harmful for the same reasons
that URNs are broken (as described above).

> Some possible solutions:
> 
> a) Note in the spec that the default algorithm doesn't work for 
>    urn: targetNamespaces, and an explicit value must be specified
>    in this case.
> b) Redo the algorithm replacing \ with ; (or similar) that is 
>    acceptable to both http and urn URI schemes.
> c) Adjust the default algorithm to use : as a separator for urns, 
>    retain \ for all other URI schemes.

Cheers.

Mark.
-- 
Mark Baker.   Ottawa, Ontario, CANADA.        http://www.markbaker.ca

Received on Monday, 17 January 2005 14:46:58 UTC