Re: XPointer

fielding@apache.org (Roy T. Fielding) writes:
>I am well aware of that.  However, URI and fragment identifiers are not
>media type specific, and in fact do not allow media type concerns to be
>interleaved with identification.

I've never seen anything formal that demanded that fragment identifiers
be independent of a particular media type - in fact, I thought fragment
identifier definitions were something that media type registrations were
supposed to provide.

For example, RFC 2396 (4.1) states:
>The semantics of a fragment identifier is a property of the data
>resulting from a retrieval action, regardless of the type of URI used
>in the reference.  Therefore, the format and interpretation of fragment
>identifiers is dependent on the media type [RFC2046] of the retrieval
>result.

In fact, RFC 2396 appears to make it clear that there may be problems
with fragment identifiers in cases where consistent definition is
difficult:
>A fragment identifier is only meaningful when a URI reference is
>intended for retrieval and the result of that retrieval is a document
>for which the identified fragment is consistently defined.

That text appears to survive in your revision draft:
<http://www.apache.org/~fielding/uri/rev-2002/rfc2396bis.html#rfc.
section.4.1>

I also don't see any plainly related issues in your issues list:
http://www.apache.org/~fielding/uri/rev-2002/issues.html

I suspect a lot of us would like more detail, preferably backed by
specification chapter and verse, to back up this claim of "do not allow
media type concerns to be interleaved with identification".

So far as I can tell, URI references in fact have serious problems with
being "meaningful" which are created by that interleaving, but that
interleaving is quite necessary and the failure of URI references to
account for it is largely explainable by the shorthand nature of URI
references and some historical factors.



-------------
Simon St.Laurent - SSL is my TLA
http://simonstl.com may be my URI
http://monasticxml.org may be my ascetic URI
urn:oid:1.3.6.1.4.1.6320 is another possibility altogether

Received on Wednesday, 30 October 2002 22:03:10 UTC