Re: 2 new W3C Notes: CHIPs and CUAP

On Tue, 28 Jan 2003, Karl Dubost wrote:

> QA Activity has published two W3C Notes: CHIPs and CUAP
> ...
> CHIPS	http://www.w3.org/TR/2003/NOTE-chips-20030128/
>
> Please send comments to ... www-qa@w3.org.

CHIPs says:

	> Note also that the HTTP Etag can be shared by identical
	> resources that have different URIs. For example, if
	> http:// mirror1.example.org/foo and
	> http://mirror2.example.org/foo share the same ETags, you
	> can then deduct that those are equivalent resources.

The opening statement is technically correct, but the example
violates HTTP rules. Equal ETags do not imply equivalent
resources!  ETags have resource-based scope; comparing ETags for
different URLs (different resources) is not defined by HTTP. To
quote RFC 2616:

   A given entity tag value MAY be used for entities obtained by
   requests on different URIs. The use of the same entity tag
   value in conjunction with entities obtained by requests on
   different URIs does not imply the equivalence of those
   entities.

I suggest that CHIPs uses the above RFC paragraph (or its
polished-for-readability version) instead of the current misleading
statement and incorrect example.


	> Guideline 1: Choose URIs wisely

Please note that CHIPs URI itself violates at least checkpoint
1.2.II as it contains mixed case. Also, checkpoint 1.2.II
contradicts checkpoint 1.2.III since "first letter uppercase" is
also "mixed case".

Finally, W3C server probably violates checkpoint 4.1 since it uses a
"301 Moved Permanently" response when redirecting
http://www.w3.org/TR/chips to
http://www.w3.org/TR/2003/NOTE-chips-20030128/. Unless this is the
very last CHIPs version, "Moved Permanently" is not appropriate.

HTH,

Alex.

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Received on Tuesday, 28 January 2003 16:25:34 UTC