xml-dev - Re: simple question on namespaces.

[Jonathan Borden <jborden@mediaone.net>]

Uche Ogbuji wrote:

> > <SNIP/>
> > > 4) a string of the form "http://foo.org/bar.txt#baz" is a URI
reference
> > > 5) a string of the form "www.whatever.com/foo.bar" is NOT a URI
reference
> > <SNIP/>
> >
> > Does anyone else get irritated that the rest of the world seems to think
> > that 4 and 5 are the same? I see lots and lots of advertisements in
> > magazines and on television that have 'URLs' of the form
www.ourwebsite.com
> > with no preceding 'http://'. In fact I'm even more irritated now that
> > Outlook Express has highlighted the www. as if it were a link...
>
> Who says "www.whatever.com/foo.bar" is not a URI reference?  Certainly not
> RFC 2396.
>

Deep sigh.

You really *are* trying to confuse everyone right? :-)

Though it is common practice to expand the string 'www.whatever.com' into
http://www.whatever.com , per RFC 2396 the (relative) URI reference
'www.whatever.com' is not equivalent to the (absolute) URI reference
'http://www.whatever.com'

<URI.esoterica>
Most everyone expects to see 'www.whatever.com' as the 'authority' per RFC
2396. Such a string *could* also be a 'rel_segment' and hence
'www.whatever.com/foo.bar' matches the production 'rel_path' and hence
'relativeURI', but interpreting this as a relativeURI (and hence a URI
reference) will result in unexpected behavior.

When resolving a relative URI, an absolute URI is created by combining the
relative URI with the base URI. Suppose the string is used within the
document:

http://www.foo.org/bar/baz/bop.xml

and you are interpreting the string "www.whatever.com/foo.bar" as a relative
URI. The resultant absolute URI would be:

http://www.foo.org/bar/baz/www.whatever.com/foo.bar

</URI.esoterica>

Is that what you expect?

Jonathan Borden
The Open Healthcare Group
http://www.openhealth.org