Relative URI resolution and fragments: editorial comment

I recently implemented the relative URI resolution algorithm given in 
pseudocode in RFC2396bis in Java. The process was very staright-forward 
and worked very well. This is a huge improvement over the original 2396. 
Kudos!

One thing I noticed while doing so surprised me. The fragment ID of the 
base URI reference is never considered. Even if you're resolving a URI 
such as "" (the empty string) against a URI such as 
http://www.example.com/test#fragID the resolved URI is 
http://www.example.com/test.

This isn't a problem, and I can see the sense of making URI resolution 
work that way. However, it did surprise me. If there's any epxlicit 
language in the spec that notes this, I didn't find it. I suggest adding 
a sentence to section 5.2 that makes this epxlicit; something like "The 
fragment in the base URI is ignored" or "The fragment in the base URI 
always comes from the relative URI,never the base URI."

--
Elliotte Rusty Harold

Received on Saturday, 19 June 2004 12:05:45 UTC