A. Pagaltzis wrote:
But the language in RFC3986 does not consider this use case, and the language in the xml:base TR does not address same-document references at all. So there are things possible in the scope of the xml:base TR, for whose behaviour it defers to the RFC, which only considers a small subset of the possible use cases. So we have a mismatched layering of specs, for a certain class of use cases… ugh.
I think Roy T. Fielding did consider all this, given the example in http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/uri/2004Jan/0012 Also interesting is this quote from http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/uri/2004Jan/0009 "That is, the correct behavior is to parse the reference into a URI before deciding whether or not it is a same-document reference. The effect of this change, when implemented, has no impact on the protocol *except* when a person is deliberately abusing the base URI by assigning it an unrelated URI for the purpose of creating an artificial shorthand notation for external references. It should be no surprise that such usage will not be supported by the standard, since it never worked with the majority of deployed implementations." -- Sjoerd Visscher http://w3future.com/weblog/
