xml:base, yet again

I exchanged email with Roy Fielding concerning the interpretation of
xml:base attributes.

He says that same-document references are only relevant for retrieval.
RFC 2396 clearly says in the section on resolving relative references
(5.2 step 2) that an empty URI reference is a reference to the current
document, but RFC 3986 does not mention it in that context, and Roy
says that RFC 3986 was specifically intended to correct
misunderstandings about same-document references.

If we accept this, then we can return to believing that xml:base=""
is a no-op, which is certainly less surprising.  To test current
implementations, I have created an XInclude document which produces
different results depending on how xml:base="" is interpreted.

Please point your XInclude implementation at

  http://www.cogsci.ed.ac.uk/~richard/xinclude-base-test/start.xml

and see what the result is.

-- Richard

Received on Wednesday, 7 June 2006 13:40:22 UTC