RE: Secion 6 Normalization and Comparison

My point about entities and numeric char references applies 
here too.

Misha


> -----Original Message-----
> From: Roy T. Fielding [mailto:fielding@apache.org] 
> Sent: 28 April 2003 11:43
> To: Williams, Stuart
> Cc: uri@w3.org
> Subject: Re: Secion 6 Normalization and Comparison
> 
> 
> 
> >> Yes, they are always equivalent.  They won't necessarily be
> >> the same for comparison, but they are equivalent (which means
> >> applications can replace one with the other if they so desire).
> >
> > Oh...! The Namespaces 1.1 CR [1] gives the following 
> example (well yes,
> > expressed in IRI rather than URI terms):
> >
> > "The IRI references below are also all different for the purposes of
> > identifying namespaces:
> > ...
> >   http://www.example.org/~wilbur
> >   http://www.example.org/%7ewilbur
> >   http://www.example.org/%7Ewilbur
> > "
> >
> > Which I read as making these three identifiers *not* 
> equivalent for the
> > purpose of naming a namespace.
> >
> > [1] http://www.w3.org/TR/xml-names11/#IRIComparison
> 
> The Namespaces CR is welcome to choose CDATA comparison over URI 
> comparison,
> but it has no choice in regards to URI equivalence.  It cannot claim 
> they
> are different -- it can only claim that they are 
> inconsistently written.
> 
> BTW, there is no reason for the Namespaces specification to include
> the quoted text above -- they are over-specifying the protocol.  What
> they should say is that identifiers are assumed to be in normal form
> and are not normalized for consistency prior to comparison.
> 
> >>> Also, in general it is not clear to me that it is legitimate to
> >>> unescape the escape sequence, because in general one 
> doesn't know the
> > character set
> >>> of the escaped character - only authority that minted the 
> URI knows 
> >>> that
> > -
> >>> looking at a URI you only get to know what octet was escaped. [I 
> >>> think].
> >>
> >> That doesn't matter because the octet remains the same
> >> whether it is escaped or not.  The escaping merely prevents
> >> characters from being misinterpreted as delimiters of
> >> components or of the URI itself.
> >
> > I agree, it's of no consequence for octet based comparison 
> (as in [2] 
> > URI
> > Characters seq->octet seq->Original Character seq).
> >
> > *If* the document were to say very clearly that URI 
> comparisons should 
> > be
> > based on comparing octet sequences, at least for me, that would 
> > explain your
> > response above - ~, %7e, %7E all contribute the same to an octet 
> > sequence.
> 
> That is mixing normalization with comparison.  The document 
> doesn't say
> that because it isn't usually necessary -- URIs are often 
> compared with 
> the
> assumption that they are already in normal form.  That's the 
> whole point
> of the additions for section 6.
> 
> ....Roy
> 
> 


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Received on Monday, 28 April 2003 06:43:46 UTC