Re: [xml-dev] RESTful operations on document fragments

[noah_mendelsohn@us.ibm.com]

Anne Thomas Manes writes:

> I believe that fragments (#xxxx) are different from queries (?xxxx).

Yes.

> A URL containing a query string is still a URL.

Yes.

> A fragment is not part of the URL (see http://www.w3.org/TR/WD-
> html40-970708/htmlweb.html#h-4.1.1).

No, that's not quite right I think, at least not if what you mean is "part 
of a URI per the syntax defined in the latest RFC [1]".  From section 3 of 
RFC 3986, the syntax of a URI is:

        URI = scheme ":" hier-part [ "?" query ] [ "#" fragment ]

So, the fragment is syntactically part of the URI.  From section 3.5 of 
the same RFC:

"Fragment identifiers have a special role in information retrieval systems 
as the primary form of client-side indirect referencing, allowing an 
author to specifically identify aspects of an existing resource that are 
only indirectly provided by the resource owner.  As such, the fragment 
identifier is not used in the scheme-specific processing of a URI; 
instead, the fragment identifier is separated from the rest of the URI 
prior to a dereference, and thus the identifying information within the 
fragment itself is dereferenced solely by the user agent, regardless of 
the URI scheme."

You are right that the fragment identifier is not in the URI that's sent 
with the HTTP operation, but syntactically, it is part of the original 
URI.

Noah


[1] http://www.ietf.org/rfc/rfc3986.txt

--------------------------------------
Noah Mendelsohn 
IBM Corporation
One Rogers Street
Cambridge, MA 02142
1-617-693-4036
--------------------------------------