Re: Summary: Section 2: What does a URI identify?

/ "Jonathan Borden" <jonathan@openhealth.org> was heard to say:
| The next point:
| [[
| A URI that consists of only a fragment identifier (i.e, one that begins with
| a " # ") always points into the document that contains the URI, irrespective
| of the effective base URI.
| ]]
|
| I disagree. Again, particularly with RDF applications that do not
| necessarily maintain the concept of a "current document", a bare fragment
| identifier might be converted into an absolute URI + frag id, via the base
| URI. Indeed RFC 2396 explicitly licences such use when appropriate.
|
| To quote the appropriate passage:
|
| [[
| 4.2. Same-document References
|
|    A URI reference that does not contain a URI is a reference to the
|    current document.  In other words, an empty URI reference within a
|    document is interpreted as a reference to the start of that document,
|    and a reference containing only a fragment identifier is a reference
|    to the identified fragment of that document.  Traversal of such a
|    reference should not result in an additional retrieval action.
|    However, if the URI reference occurs in a context that is always
|    intended to result in a new request, as in the case of HTML's FORM
|    element, then an empty URI reference represents the base URI of the
|    current document and should be replaced by that URI when transformed
|    into a request.
| ]]
|
| Read 'however' ...
|
| Clearly (sic) however, this language ought be clarified. However, such
| clarification should represent the needs of applications that do not tend to
| resolve URIs such as RDF + OWL. In such cases, it is greatly preferable to
| compose a URIreference from the fragment identifier and base URI.

My reading of 'however' leads to exactly the semantics described in
our draft. If you need to do another GET for the resource identified
by #foo, you use "the base URI of the current document". That is not
the same as saying "the current base URI".

                                        Be seeing you,
                                          norm

-- 
Norman.Walsh@Sun.COM   | 'I have done that,' says my memory. 'I cannot
XML Standards Engineer | have done that'--says my pride, and remains
XML Technology Center  | adamant. At last--memory yields.--Nietzsche
Sun Microsystems, Inc. |

Received on Monday, 18 March 2002 16:24:42 UTC