xml-dev - Re: Irony heaped on irony

["David Brownell" <david-b@pacbell.net>]

> >Issues about "%NN" escaping crop up too, but again it's clear (IMHO) that
> >such escaping is for encodings of the URIs, not to the URIs themselves.
> >So again, comparing URIs must remove such escapes.
>
> This is one distinction between Absolutized and Canonicalized form;
> character escapes are _not_ expanded in the former, according to the
> algorithm given in the URI spec. This point of confusion is one reason
some
> of us are dubious about whether Absolutizing is really the right answer
> even if one did want to "compare the names as URIs."

Comparision would thus require both absolutizing, and canonicalization
of whatever encoded form the URI is found in.  Which is no surprise;
one never compares encoded forms unless they are themselves a sort of
canonicalized form already.

(Which is why cryptographic encodings often make a point of ensuring
encryption does _not_ canonicalize, as a minor digression.)


> If implicit behavior causes confusion, making it explicit is always a good
> bet.

Right, but in this case the issue may be that folk are implicitly using
a broken URI comparison algorithm ... the solution is not to stop using
URI comparision, but to explicitly use a non-broken algorithm.

- Dave



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