- From: Adam M. Costello BOGUS address, see signature <BOGUS@BOGUS.nicemice.net>
- Date: Mon, 9 Aug 2004 06:11:09 +0000
- To: uri@w3.org
I haven't had time to keep up with the URI developments, but the recent progress prompted me to check on the status of a pet issue. Consider the URI http://www.w3.org/. What is this "www.w3.org" and what does it refer to? The HTTP spec does not say that this field is a domain name, it says it is a host token as defined in RFC-2396, and RFC-2396 says that a host token is either an IP address literal or a domain name (and in this case, we can rule out IP address literal based on the syntax). Okay, great, the thing in the URI is without doubt a domain name, so I can send this URI anywhere and expect it to be interpreted the same way, because there is a single global domain name space. Now suppose RFC-2396 gets obsoleted by draft-fielding-uri-rfc2396bis-06 (after it becomes an RFC). Do the references from the HTTP spec to RFC-2396 continue to refer to RFC-2396, or will they be understood to refer to rfc2396bis? If they refer to rfc2396bis, then we need to look at the new definition of the host token in rfc2396bis, which goes out of its way to state that there are other possibilities for the host token besides IP addresses and domain names: In other cases, the data within the host component identifies a registered name that has nothing to do with an Internet host." A host identified by a registered name is a sequence of characters that is usually intended for lookup within a locally-defined host or service name registry, though the URI's scheme-specific semantics may require that a specific registry (or fixed name table) be used instead. This implies that the meaning of http://www.w3.org/ might change depending on where it is interpreted, unless the HTTP spec requires the use of domain names, which it currently does not (because it depends on RFC-2396 for that requirement). Does the HTTP spec need to be updated to explicitly require domain names? Or is it intended to relax the semantics of http URIs and allow http://www.w3.org/ to mean different things in different places? (Of course the same issue is likely to arise for other URI schemes; http is the one I've checked.) AMC http://www.nicemice.net/amc/
Received on Monday, 9 August 2004 06:11:11 UTC