Re: revised "generic syntax" internet draft

[Foteos Macrides <[e-mail]>]

"Roy T. Fielding" <[e-mail]> wrote:
>[...] "rough consensus" [...]

	The rules for resolving partial/relative URLs since the
beginning of URL time have been such that if relative symbolic
elements end up at the beginning of paths they should be retained,
e.g., you can end up with something like:

	http://host/../foo/blah.html

but Netscape's parsing ends up stripping lead relative symbolic
elements yielding:

	http://host/foo/blah.html

with the consequence that many people are putting HREFs and SRCs
in their markup which by "valid" parsing rules yield lead
relative symbolic elements, and sending of "false bug reports"
to non-Netscape browser developers with one or another variant
of:

	 "It works fine with Netscape."

	I can see retaining the lead relative symbolic elements
in ftp URLs for personal accounts (would generally fail for
anonymous accounts), but to my knowledge no http or https server
would accept such paths, so there's that kind of justification
what Netscape is doing.

	I would appreciate your and others' opinions on whether
it would be good or bad for other browsers to reverse engineer
for that Netscape URL resolving.

				Fote

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 Foteos Macrides            Worcester Foundation for Biomedical Research
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