URL resolution sanity check

I need to confirm something. Consider the following situation:

<parent xml:base="http://www.example.com/data/limit/..">
   <child xml:base="test.xml"/>
</parent>

Is the base URL of the child element
http://www.example.com/data/limit/test.xml or
http://www.example.com/data/test.xml ?

In other words, is http://www.example.com/data/limit/.. essentially the
same as http://www.example.com/data/limit/../ or not?

Both the algorithms in RFC 2396 and 3RFC 986 seem to indicate that the 
result is http://www.example.com/data/limit/test.xml, not 
http://www.example.com/data/test.xml. I'm not sure if:

A. I'm misreading the algorithm
B. This is a bug in the algorithm
C. This is an often unrecognized but intended consequence of the 
specification

The problem is that both 2396 and 3986 remove the segment following the 
last slash *before* removing dot segments. Thus 
http://www.example.com/data/limit/.. and 
http://www.example.com/data/limit/../ do not get treated the same.

Perhaps there is a way out of this. If removal of dot segments were 
applied to *all* URIS, not just at the resolution step, then we could 
say that the base URI of <parent 
xml:base="http://www.example.com/data/limit/.."/> was actually 
http://www.example.com/data/, not http://www.example.com/data/limit/.. 
In this case the relative resolution works as we expect. However, I can 
find no justification for that leap in XML Base, XML Infoset, or RFC 3986.

This would affect other URIs as well. For instance, what is the base URI of

<foo xml:base="http://www.example.com/test/.././data.xml" /> ? Is it 
http://www.example.com/test/.././data.xml or 
http://www.example.com/data.xml? This one may be academic, but in the 
case I originally proposed, you could actually end up linking 
to/including/loading a different document depending on how you handle this.

I suspect similar issues apply with an HTML BASE element as well. 
Possibly there are other cases where this may apply.

-- 
Elliotte Rusty Harold  elharo@metalab.unc.edu
XML in a Nutshell 3rd Edition Just Published!
http://www.cafeconleche.org/books/xian3/
http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ISBN=0596007647/cafeaulaitA/ref=nosim

Received on Tuesday, 19 July 2005 12:25:10 UTC