Re: neither FCNS nor FOAFSSL can read a new foaf card (hosted in Azure). RDFa validators at W3C and RDFachecker say its fine...

On 12/29/11 4:04 AM, Mo McRoberts wrote:
> hold on a second.
>
> is somebody saying fragment identifiers SHOULD be included in a request somewhere?
>
> HTTP/1.0 and HTTP/1.1 very explicitly say otherwise (and as far as I can tell, HTTPbis WG outputs haven't changed that), and last I checked nothing about linked data changes that? part of the point of linked data is that it doesn't require anything "special"
>
> AFAICT, a server is perfectly within its rights to return a 4xx response to request containing a fragment, and that includes a 400 (Bad Request), given that an unescaped '#' isn't permitted in a Request-URI.

Its a loooong story.

Fragment Identifiers not going of the wire arose from a typo (I hear) a 
long time ago during spec development. It lead to the common (and 
eventually accepted) practice of not sending Fragment Identifiers over 
the wire, but Microsoft didn't initially adopt this i.e., they stuck to 
pre typo definition.

Its also one of the reasons why DBpedia adopted slash rather than hash 
URIs since the project's goal was about: just working, in a browser 
agnostic way.

>
> if there's a spec somewhere which says otherwise, I'd love to know about it (not least so I can tweak my own servers), but the current httpbis-p1-messaging draft even goes as far as to say:
>
> "Note: Fragments ([RFC3986], Section 3.5) are not part of the request-target and thus will not be transmitted in an HTTP request."
>
> To the best of my knowledge this is a point of clarification, rather than a change in specification, it's just that some folk hadn't read the URI ABNF properly.

It's a mess. But for now, I think Microsoft has tweaked its HTTP 
products (browers, servers, and proxies) thereby reducing perpetuation 
of this problem. They were the last hold out.

I might dig up some reference links if I get some time.

Kingsley
>
> M.
>


-- 

Regards,

Kingsley Idehen	
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OpenLink Software
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