Re: URL-Reference / "empty URL" question

[Larry Masinter <[e-mail]>]

>  <A NAME="top">Top<A>
>  ....
>  <A NAME=link-1" HREF="http://a.host/a.file.html"    >link one   </A>
>  <A NAME=link-2" HREF="http://a.host/a.file.html#top">link two   </A>
>  <A NAME=link-3" HREF="#top"                         >link three </A>
> 

> (At least with the Lynx code currently under development,) activating
> ("following") link-1 will result in a new network request.  Activating
> link-3 will not, but will just change the view of the current document,

> The question is, what happens with link-2 - should following it result
> in a new request, as for link-1, or just repositioning within the
> already loaded document as for link-3?

We actually discussed this at length, and came to the design that
we intended to write, where (as you assert) link-2 is similar to
link-1 and not link-3, and should cause a new "dereference".

The way I think of this, link 3 doesn't
doesn't refer to "the resource at the URL of this document" but really
"my local copy in this here buffer, file://localhost/blah/".

I haven't figured out how to make this any clearer in the draft, though.

> My reading of the draft is that they do not resolve to the same thing,
> and that implementing things this way (first "resolve" a given
> URL-Reference into a "full" URL-Reference with a non-empty absolute
> URL, then do all further processing with that) actually contradicts
> the draft - although it probably is used by a lot of implementations.

Are you sure? I suppose we need to survey interoperable implementations
to see.

Larry