- From: Larry Masinter <masinter@attlabs.att.com>
- Date: Tue, 20 Jun 2000 22:41:37 -0700
- To: "Henrik Frystyk Nielsen" <frystyk@microsoft.com>, <Daniel.Veillard@w3.org>, "Simon St.Laurent" <simonstl@simonstl.com>
- Cc: <XML-uri@w3.org>
> There is nothing HTTP specific in the description of how to compare URIs - > it just happens that HTTP URIs "use" all features of the URI spec. This is > why the section is called "URI Comparison". The rules are general for any > URI. The description of URL comparison in the HTTP document was only for the purpose of describing the equivalence of URLs used in the HTTP protocol. It certainly wasn't intended to have greater scope of applicability and shouldn't be taken out of context as some evidence about how namespace names should be compared. To support this, I point to RFC 2557 which also passed IETF review as Proposed Standard, which uses byte-for-byte equivalence after absolutization (and not HTTP equivalence) to determine URI equality for deciding whether a multipart/related body part 'matches' an embedded URL. If the HTTP equivalence rules were supposed to be applied outside of HTTP, then RFC 2557 would have to be revised. They're not, and it shouldn't. > The other point that I made was that "it is ok to do octet-by-octet > comparison if you take into account relative URIs". If an application > wants to do smarter comparison then it is free to do so but you don't have > to. RFC 2557 doesn't say this, it mandates octet-by-octet comparison.
Received on Wednesday, 21 June 2000 01:41:30 UTC