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Re: Best Practice for URI construction?


querystring without question mark
The day after that mail I sent the following, having reread the spec
and decided that my interpretation, and memory, was faulty:

"Well looking things over I think I was wrong about the spec, my
understanding for the last couple years has been very molded by
"Universal Resource Identifiers - Axioms of Web Architecture",
http://www.w3.org/DesignIssues/Axioms.html , the part which I felt was
relevant here was from
http://www.w3.org/DesignIssues/Axioms.html#query

to quote:

"An important case is the treatment of the question mark in HTML
forms. There is a convention that infformation returned from HTML
forms is returned by encoding it and appending it to the URI. The
question mark within the URI is used to separate the basic URI from
parameters which are appended to it to perform an operation. A typical
use is for a search, and the string following the question mark is
often known as a query string.

When a query string and fragment identifier are used, the function
evaluated on dereferencing a URL

        http://foo/bar?baz#frag
 Is
        select(get( "foo", "query("bar","baz")), "frag")


where

   * query (resource, querystring) is evaluated by the resource "bar"
   * "bar" is opaque to all except the server "foo" ;
   * "baz" is a format understood by client and by the resource "foo/bar";
   * get(server, restofuri) is executed by the client engine which
understands "foo" but not "bar"
   * select(fragmentid, resource) is evaluated on the client by the
resource's handling code
"

That is to say that the resource and the querystring are two things
that are seperate from each other, the two parameters of the function
query - of which one parameter, querystring is optional.

We can have a resource without a querystring.

Don't really feel that we can have a querystring without a resource,
unless we do some clever argumentation removed from the facts on the
ground."

Perhaps it is just my not wanting to throw away a viewpoint that I
have grown used to, but I really feel it is more useful to think of a
querystring as not being part of the resource itself, but as
identifying aspects of it.

And this is despite having developed applications in which the
querystring quite clearly was part of the resource.

Cheers,
Bryan Rasmussen


On 12/11/05, Tim Bray <tbray@t...> wrote:
> On Dec 9, 2005, at 1:18 PM, bryan rasmussen wrote:
>
> >> According to RFC 3986,
> >> Section 3.4:
> >>
> >>     The query component contains non-hierarchical data that, along
> >> with
> >>     data in the path component (Section 3.3), serves to identify a
> >>     resource within the scope of the URI's scheme and naming
> >> authority
> >>     (if any).[1]
> >>
> >> I read that as saying that the query part participates in
> >> identifying a
> >> resource just as much as the path does.
> >>
> > No, I read that as saying the path identifies the location of the
> > resource, the querystring identifies something akin to metadata of the
> > resource.
>
> I believe you are wrong.  I think that text should be read as saying
> what it says, i.e. that the stuff in the query component and the
> stuff in the path component together serve to identify the resource.
> End of story.  -Tim
>
>

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