Subject: href element interpretation

From: [email-masked] (Tim Ellison OTT)
Date: Thu, 07 Oct 1999 11:51:04 -0400

Please can someone confirm that when a server responds with an <href> 
element (RFC2518 section 12.3) containing a relative URI, the base URI will 
always be the retrieval URI (RFC 2396 section 5.1.3) (i.e. the Request-URI).

All the examples in RFC2518 seem to return absolute-URIs.

Thanks
Tim

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From: "Geoffrey M. Clemm" <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 7 Oct 1999 13:10:06 -0400

From: [email-masked] (Tim Ellison OTT)

RFC-2518 is broken in this regard.  It says that:

   A collection is a resource whose state consists of at least a list of
   internal member URIs ... the internal member URI is equal to a
   containing collection's URI plus an additional segment for non-
   collection resources, or additional segment plus trailing slash "/"
   for collection resources, where segment is defined in section 3.3 of
   [RFC2396].

This means that the "state" of a collection varies according to
which URI you use to reference it.  It *should* have said:

   ... the internal member URI is a relative URI equal to "./"
   plus an additional segment for non-collection resources,...

Until that bug is fixed, I believe the consensus is that the
href should be relative to the retrieval URI.

Judy: This is something we need to mention in the Bindings protocol
as a bug in 2518 that needs to be fixed.

Cheers,
Geoff

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From: Jim Whitehead <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 7 Oct 1999 16:59:58 -0700

Our original intent was to use the algorithm described in Section 5.1
"Establishing a Base URI" of RFC 2376 ("Uniform Resource Identifiers (URI):
Generic Syntax") <http://www.ics.uci.edu/pub/ietf/uri/rfc2396.txt>.  In
particular, the language in Section 5.1.3, "Base URI from the Retrieval URI"
applies most to WebDAV.

Or, in short, I agree with your interpretation. :-)

- Jim

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From: Greg Stein <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 11 Oct 1999 00:49:27 -0700 (PDT)

On Thu, 7 Oct 1999, Geoffrey M. Clemm wrote:
>...

This is the position that mod_dav takes.

It has been argued in the past that the <href> element should only contain
an absoluteURI. I'm not sure that I agree with that position, though.

Cheers,
-g

--
Greg Stein, http://www.lyra.org/