Re: [richard@inf.ed.ac.uk: xml:base, yet again]

> I thought this through quite a lot at the time. I'm not sure I can 
> easily reproduce my thought process now, though you might find something 
> in the archives of xom-interest, and the various xinclude and xml base 
> lists. I suspect this section from RFC 3986 is relevant:

Thanks.  We initially came to the same conclusion in the Core WG, but
we have been told that it was not the intention of the RFC authors
that it be interpreted in this way.  Same-document references are only
meant to be about retrieval.  The second paragraph you quote starts
with that condition:

>     When a same-document reference is dereferenced for a retrieval
>     action, the target of that reference is defined to be within the same
>     entity (representation, document, or message) as the reference;
>     therefore, a dereference should not result in a new retrieval action.

Your interpretation is more convincing for RFC2396, which says that
it's "a reference to the current document" right in the middle of the
relative reference resolution algorithm, but according to Roy Fielding
it's a "common misunderstanding" corrected in 3986.

This is of course an xml:base issue rather than an XInclude one, but
XInclude is the easiest way to see what existing implementations do.

-- Richard

Received on Wednesday, 7 June 2006 23:14:35 UTC