At 10:15 AM 10/2/00 -0500, Paul Grosso wrote:
I found a mention of fragment identifier and the # separator in
RFC 2396 [1], but I'm still looking for the discussion of the ?
and | separator (especially, whether they require/allow the entire
resource to be downloaded first or not and exactly where/by whom
the bit after the | or ? should get processed). Can someone give
pointers to the specs that answer these questions? (I've already
looked at RFC 1738, 1808, and 2396.) Thanks.
[1] ftp://ftp.ietf.org/rfc/rfc2396.txt
The "query component" (starting with a ?) is discussed in RFC 2396, but I'm
surprised, on reading this now, that it doesn't say more about the
server/user agent distinction. It does say "The query component is a
string of information to be interpreted by the resource", and perhaps
that's 2396-speak meaning that it's information to be interpreted by the
system that serves the resource.
The | separator was invented out of whole cloth in an early version of
XLL/XLink; when we (the W3C XML Linking WG) broke out the XPointer stuff
into its own spec, the | went away because we had been inappropriately
messing with basic URI functionality. Once we got on the track of defining
a fragment identifier language for a particular set of media types, the
scope became somewhat simpler and clearer.
Eve
--
Eve Maler +1 781 442 3190
Sun Microsystems XML Technology Center eve.maler @ east.sun.com