Re: href element interpretation

   From: Tim_Ellison@oti.com (Tim Ellison OTT)

   Please can someone confirm that when a server responds with an <href> 
   element (RFC2518 section 12.3) containing a relative URI, the base URI will 
   always be the retrieval URI (RFC 2396 section 5.1.3) (i.e. the Request-URI).

   All the examples in RFC2518 seem to return absolute-URIs.

RFC-2518 is broken in this regard.  It says that:

   A collection is a resource whose state consists of at least a list of
   internal member URIs ... the internal member URI is equal to a
   containing collection's URI plus an additional segment for non-
   collection resources, or additional segment plus trailing slash "/"
   for collection resources, where segment is defined in section 3.3 of
   [RFC2396].

This means that the "state" of a collection varies according to
which URI you use to reference it.  It *should* have said:

   ... the internal member URI is a relative URI equal to "./"
   plus an additional segment for non-collection resources,...

Until that bug is fixed, I believe the consensus is that the
href should be relative to the retrieval URI.

Judy: This is something we need to mention in the Bindings protocol
as a bug in 2518 that needs to be fixed.

Cheers,
Geoff

Received on Thursday, 7 October 1999 13:10:11 UTC