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Re: URL resolution sanity check

• To: Bob Foster <bob@o...>
• Subject: Re: URL resolution sanity check
• From: Elliotte Harold <elharo@m...>
• Date: Sun, 10 Jul 2005 06:05:30 -0400
• Cc: XML Developers List <xml-dev@l...>
• In-reply-to: <42CFFAB1.7020307@o...>
• References: <42CFF33E.3030105@m...> <42CFFAB1.7020307@o...>
• User-agent: Mozilla Thunderbird 1.0.2 (Macintosh/20050317)

Bob Foster wrote:

> Therefore, http://www.example.com/data/test.xml and yes. Is there some 
> other part of the spec that raised this question? The "last segment is 
> removed" part?

3986 is normative now and has replaced 2396. However both the algorithms 
in 2396 and 3986 seem to indicate that the result is 
http://www.example.com/data/limit/test.xml, not 
http://www.example.com/data/test.xml. I'm not sure if:

A. I'm misreading the algorithm
B. This is a bug in the algorithm
C. This is an often unrecognized consequence of the specification

The problem is that both 2396 and 3986 remove the segment following the 
last slash *before* removing dot segments. Thus 
http://www.example.com/data/limit/.. and 
http://www.example.com/data/limit/../ do not get treated the same.

The point about servers automatically appending a / at the end is a good 
one. However in the case I've constructed with xml:base, I don't think 
this applies.

Hmm, perhaps there is a way out of this. If removal of dot segments were 
applied to *all* URIS, not just at the resolution step, then we could 
say that the base URI of <parent 
xml:base="http://www.example.com/data/limit/.."/> was actually 
http://www.example.com/data/, not http://www.example.com/data/limit/.. 
In this case the relative resolution works as we expect. However, I can 
find no justification for that leap in XML Base, XML Infoset, or RFC 3986.

This would affect other URIs as well. For instance, what is the base URI of

<foo xml:base="http://www.example.com/test/.././data.xml" /> ? Is it 
http://www.example.com/test/.././data.xml or 
http://www.example.com/data.xml? This one may be academic, but in the 
case I originally proposed, you could actually end up linking 
to/including/loading a different document depending on how you handle this.

-- 
Elliotte Rusty Harold  elharo@m...
XML in a Nutshell 3rd Edition Just Published!
http://www.cafeconleche.org/books/xian3/
http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ISBN=0596007647/cafeaulaitA/ref=nosim

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