Re: A proposed solution

On Tue, Jun 20, 2000 at 02:09:43AM -0400, Simon St.Laurent wrote:
> In the section below, Henrik Frystyk Nielsen cites section 3.2.3 of the
> HTTP 1.1 specification, which has one of the clearest explanations I've
> found on how to compare URIs.
> 
> At the same time, it raises a lot of questions about URI comparison in the
> context of XML parsing, and how much understanding of URIs is required for
> an XML parser to have an even close to reliable URI comparison algorithm.
> 
> The process described below requires:
> - an understanding of protocol port numbers
> - an understanding of URI encoding
> - an understanding of which part of the URI is the hostname, and therefore
> case-insensitive
> 
> Does all of this additional information really belong in an XML parser?
> 
> I don't think so, though others seem to.

  I don't think so either, for the very simple reason that HTTP is just
one of the URI schemes possibles. I don't see why one should handle 
specifically HTTP, XML should not be bound in any way to a specific
transport mechanism (though being able to get encoding information is
one of the exception w.r.t. transport in the XML spec).
  If there was one general rule (or rather an algorigthm) allowing to 
know if 2 URI were equivalent, then I would consider the proposal of
adding this detection to the namespace specification in a friendly way.
But no such algorithm exist. There is a complicated set of rules, per
schemes, and I expect a large number of new scheme to be added before
XML documents disapear from the Web.

  So
  - why HTTP only ? what's happen if I want to put Schemas which are the
    binding contract for my electronic commerce on a secure https server ? 
    should we duplicate all rules applying to HTTP to HTTPS in the namespace
    spec ?
  - should all that protocol dependant rules be added to a data language
    description ?

  IMHO, no and no.

Daniel

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Received on Tuesday, 20 June 2000 03:57:35 UTC