Re: Posted draft of URI comparison finding

Elliotte Rusty Harold wrote:
> I think the sentence "Put another way, it is often possible to determine 
> that two URIs are the same, but it is in general never possible to be 
> sure that they are different." is incorrect, and should be deleted. The 
> previous sentence, "comparisons of two URIs can establish with 
> confidence that they are equivalent and identify the same resource" is 
> correct. However, just because two URIs identify the same resource does 
> not imply they are the same URI.

The sentence needs work, but I think the basic claim is correct; that 
any two URIs might happen to identify the same resource, and there is no 
way to prove that they don't.

> Under URI schemes, the word "prefix" is not in keeping with RFC 2396 
> terminology. 2396 uses the word "prefix" only twice, and in both cases 
> it clearly means something different than you mean here. I believe the 
> correct term is "scheme name". or just "scheme".

Right.

> In "Comparison of Relative URI References" the claim is made that URI 
> references can be relative and URIs cannot be. I've heard this before, 
> but I don't think RFC 2396 actually states this. My reading of 2396 is 
> that relative things are indeed URIs (and also URI references). The 
> authors of 2396 may have intended that all URIs be absolute. However, 
> they failed to put such language into the spec.

We're relying on Roy and the process to clean up the 2396 language -Tim

Received on Wednesday, 11 December 2002 15:10:59 UTC