Re: Base URIs vs. Document URIs.

At 08:46 2002 01 11 -0800, Jason Diamond wrote:
>> >Is there any way to resolve something like "#s" against the base URI and
>not
>> >the document URI?
>>
>> I'd suggest that you shouldn't be calling resolveURI at all in the case
>> that the relative URI reference is merely a fragment identifier.  There
>> is nothing to resolve.
>
>I need some function that accepts a URI reference and returns a URI. If you
>know of a more appropriate name than resolveURI then I would be happy to use
>it. I only chose resolveURI since Appendix C uses the term resolve and it
>includes the example of the URI reference "#s".

I'm gathering you want resolveURI to take any URI ref and return an
absolute URI reference.  

Instead, what I would do is define resolveURI as a function that 
takes any URI-reference-up-to-but-not-including-the-fragment-id [1] and 
returns the appropriate absolute URI.  The fragment id part is never
sent to resolveURI and is always re-appended to what resolveURI returns [2].

In this model, if resolveURI is handed a null string, it just returns
a null string and the calling code would know to use the fragment id
to access into the current resource without anyone having to talk
about a document URI (which may not exist if, say, you're working
on some in-memory view of a dynamic document--and even if there is
such a URI, you wouldn't want to use the URI to do a fetch of the
document that is the current one anyway).

>I only asked the question out of pure curiosity--I don't think I would ever
>need to do it.
>
>But just so I understand, let's say that my document URI is
><http://example.org/document.xml> and my base URI is
><http://example.org/base.xml> and I want to resolve to
><http://example.org/base.xml#fragment>, the only URI reference that I can
>think of that would get me what I want is <base.xml#fragment> because if I
>used <#fragment>, it would get resolved to
><http://example.org/document.xml#fragment>. Is this correct?

Al already gave an extended answer.  Briefly, you've got the idea:
relative URI refs consisting only of the fragment id are different
in that they are not affected by the base URI, they are always
relative to the current resource.

paul

[1] RFC 2396 doesn't have a term to describe this.  Rather, it has:
 URI-reference = [ absoluteURI | relativeURI ] [ "#" fragment ]
and so I am referring to the "[ absoluteURI | relativeURI ]" part.

[2] TimBL talks about putting the fragment identifier in your back pocket, 
resolving the rest of the URI reference into a resource, then taking the 
fragment id out of your back pocket and using it to access into the resource.

Received on Friday, 11 January 2002 12:48:42 UTC