xml-dev - Re: simple question on namespaces.

[Uche Ogbuji <uche.ogbuji@fourthought.com>]

> > > <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? :-)

_I'm_ trying to confuse everyone?  Well, it would be a neat effect if I
could pull it off but no, I was genuinely puzzled.  I'll admit that I
missed the exact context, or even who was quoted, but I assumed that the
comment came in the context of Paul's query about W3C's using

"www.w3.org/..."

in their official namespaces rather than

"http://www.w3.org/..."

I thought someone was saying that this would be wrong because it was not a
valid URI ref.  I didn't really make much connection to the talk about
defaulting in user agents.

> 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'

Of course.  Never said it was.

> <URI.esoterica>
[snip]
> </URI.esoterica>
>
> Is that what you expect?

I don't think it's really all that esoteric.  I have quite a few
directories of my hard drive of the form "www.fourthought.com",
"www.4suite.org", etc.  Several of the other software packages I
install have similar directories.  There is no reason for one to think
that such a name couldn't be part of a path.

But I think we're all on the same page now.  Sorry for the confusion.  In
my defence, the sentence to which I responded *was* wrong.  No two ways
about it.


-- 
Uche Ogbuji                               Principal Consultant
uche.ogbuji@fourthought.com               +1 303 583 9900 x 101
Fourthought, Inc.                         http://Fourthought.com
4735 East Walnut St, Ste. C, Boulder, CO 80301-2537, USA
Software-engineering, knowledge-management, XML, CORBA, Linux, Python