Re: URI versus URI Reference

-----Original Message-----
From: Paul W. Abrahams <abrahams@valinet.com>
To: michaelm@netsol.com <michaelm@netsol.com>
Cc: abrahams@acm.org <abrahams@acm.org>; Tim Berners-Lee <timbl@w3.org>;
John Cowan <jcowan@reutershealth.com>; xml-uri@w3.org <xml-uri@w3.org>
Date: Wednesday, May 24, 2000 9:38 PM
Subject: Re: URI versus URI Reference


>Michael Mealling wrote:
>
>> A URI Reference means that you have a defined base
>> and that fragments make sense because you know the content type of the
>> thing you are linking to. 2396 specifically divided the two. A 2396 'URI'
>> is what folx here have been calling an "absolutized URI".
>>
>> I.e. the strict data type 'URI' does not allow for the relative URIs or
>> fragments. "URI References" are allowed to have all of those things.
>> The reasoning is that in many cases URIs get used by things that
>> aren't documents and for which relative and fragment semantics make no
sense.
>
>The odd thing about 2396 is that there's only one place where it actually
defines a
>URI, and that's in the Abstract (which should really be redundant and
non-normative
>anyway).   Other than that, it just talks about the properties of URIs and
the
>expectations we have of them.  Nowhere does it say that a URI must be
absolute.  I
>can't find a single sentence, other than the one in the Abstract, that says
``A URI
>is ...'', and the one in the abstract only says that a URI is a compact
string of
>characters for identifying an abstract or physical resource.   Nor can I
find a
>syntax rule whose left side is `URI'.  Is there an explicit definition of
``the
>strict data type `URI' '' in 2396 that I've missed?
>
>There is, however, a definition of the term URI-reference and a syntax rule
for it.
>
>There's also the oddity of Section A, which is entitled ``Collected BNF for
URI''
>but does not define the nonterminal URI.


Good point.

It uses the term absoluteURI.
http://www.ietf.org/rfc/rfc2396.txt
page 26.

This is the language term what is referred to generally as a URI.
Perhaps a revision is in order to clear this up.

Tim BL

Received on Thursday, 25 May 2000 19:32:07 UTC