Re: XBase: unsetting the base URI

[Forwarding (with permission) the results of a private conversation about
this issue.]

[Jonathan Marsh wrote:]

How could a document be included without knowing it's base URL?

[Richard Tobin wrote:]

I guess you're right, but there might be some possibilities:

(1) Referring to the including document itself, where the including
document somehow doesn't have a URL (eg you've consed it up using the
DOM rather than reading it from somewhere). However, I think this
can't be a problem, because in that case either:
- the including location does not have a known URL, in which case you
won't need to set it to unknown for the included node, or
- the including location has a known URL, in which case it can't refer
to the parts of the document which don't. Consider:

  <a>
    <z id="foo"/>
    <b xml:base="http://bar">
      <xml:include href="#foo"/>
    </b>
  </a>

The idea is to refer to include the z element, but you can't, because
"#foo" is merged with "http://bar".

(2) Referring to a document with a known URL, but in which the
pointed-to node somehow doesn't have a know URL. But probably the
only way to do that would be if xml:base="" worked to set the base URL
to unknown, and then there wouldn't be a problem.

(3) The case I was actually imagining was performing XInclusion between
two hand-created infosets, but of course you can't do that because there
is no way for one to refer to the other.

So there is probably no issue here.

Received on Tuesday, 14 March 2000 13:06:39 UTC