href="http:something.html", and advocady

Hello,

I've noticed that some sites (the latest I found is
http://www.lri.fr/~aze/page_c/aide_c/c_gauche.html ) have an unusual way
of writing URIs, something like HREF="http:union.html"...

Those are cited in rfc2396, for example, but "should be avoided".
(See excerpts below this mail.)

Netscape 4.x, Lynx 2.8.1, accept this scheme.

Links 0.96 is unaware, and interprets this way:
http://www.lri.fr/~aze/page_c/aide_c/http:union.html

Galeon 0.12.1 doesn't like it (not checked exactly, looks like it does a
ns lookup on "union.html").

I don't know if the w3c validator, or the WDG validator check the
conformance of URI's in documents, and if they have to (these are
textual element attributes, not part of the SGML tree). If it's not an
error, it has something to do with document accessibility, so...
Perhaps, this should trigger a warning ?

Can you put some light on me ?



Also, do you think that in such case I should e-mail the author of such
pages, gently complaining that accessing his documents is a bit
difficult and citing the validator's URL ?

Have you got some "advocacy pages for the maybe-ignorant/reluctant
reader ?"

This one: http://www.htmlhelp.com/tools/validator/reasons.html is bad,
because it it based on particular versions of browsers, and is bound to
be outdated.
This one: http://valet.htmlhelp.com/page/why.html is better.

I'm open to further advice. Thank you.


http://www.ietf.org/rfc/rfc2396.txt

 Due to a loophole in prior specifications [RFC1630], some parsers
      allow the scheme name to be present in a relative URI if it is the
      same as the base URI scheme.  Unfortunately, this can conflict
      with the correct parsing of non-hierarchical URI.  For backwards
      compatibility, an implementation may work around such references
      by removing the scheme if it matches that of the base URI and the
      scheme is known to always use the <hier_part> syntax.  The parser

Berners-Lee, et. al.        Standards Track                    [Page 20]

RFC 2396                   URI Generic Syntax                August 1998


      can then continue with the steps below for the remainder of the
      reference components.  Validating parsers should mark such a
      misformed relative reference as an error.


Berners-Lee, et. al.        Standards Track                    [Page 31]

RFC 2396                   URI Generic Syntax                August 1998


   Some parsers allow the scheme name to be present in a relative URI if
   it is the same as the base URI scheme.  This is considered to be a
   loophole in prior specifications of partial URI [RFC1630]. Its use
   should be avoided.

      http:g        =  http:g           ; for validating parsers
                    |  http://a/b/c/g   ; for backwards compatibility




-- 
Stéphane Gourichon - Labo. d'Informatique de Paris 6 - AnimatLab

Received on Thursday, 24 January 2002 09:39:13 UTC