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Re: [decade] FW: Last Call: <draft-farrell-decade-ni-07.txt> (Naming Things with Hashes) to Proposed Standard

2012-06-12 05:44:27
Hello Stephen,

On 2012/06/09 10:45, Stephen Farrell wrote:

On 06/09/2012 01:43 AM, Sam Hartman wrote:

It's a naming
hierarchy.  My main concern is whether the relative reference algorithm
described in section 5/4.2 of RFC 3986. In particular take a look at the
last part of section 1.2 of RFC 3986 regarding the disallowing of
/. Consider how you want relative references in an HTML document
resolved through a ni: URI to work.  I don't think your use of authority
provides good results. However I'm not sure that better results would be
achieved without hierarchy.  I hope though that these comments will help
inject some ways of reasoning about authority that are less mystical and
that lead to more practical discussion.

Thanks.

I think your comment about relative URIs is fair and we maybe ought
say there are no such things for ni URIs. (Or however that kind of
thing is stated best).

You can't say that. It's perfectly okay to have an HTML document like this:

<html>
 <head>
   <title>ni: relative URI test</title>
   <base href="ni://example.com">
 </head>

 <body>
   <p>Please check <a href="sha-256;f4OxZX...">this document</a>.
     And <a href="sha-256;UyaQV...">this other document</a>.
     And <a href="sha-256-128;...">this third document</a>.
   </p>
 </body>
</html>

("..." used for brevity). What the browser will try to interpret when the links are activated is:
ni://example.com/sha-256;f4OxZX...
ni://example.com/sha-256;UyaQV...
ni://example.com/sha-256-128;...

If you don't think that makes sense, then you might just leave it to users to not use it that way. On the other hand, if you think that's actively harmful (I couldn't come up with a reason for that), then you have to change to the form without //.

[Well, actual browser behavior is a bit more mixed:

IE does what's explained above, and tries to go to the address, but says that this page can't be displayed.

Safari uses the above resolved URIs when asked to copy the link, and also tries to follow the link saying that the page can't be opened.

Mozilla doesn't even show the link texts as links, nor allows to activate them, probably because it decides that it doesn't want to disappoint the user when she clicks.

Chrome shows the underlined links, but doesn't want to show any destination when hoovering. When activating, it goes to about:blank.

Opera shows and tries to go to ni://sha-256;f4OxZX... and similar, i.e. it seems to drop the authority, possibly because it doesn't have ni: registered as a hierarchical scheme. But that would be fixed when the scheme is getting implemented.]

I guess a sentence or two about relative URIs would be worthwhile
and I'll ponder that.

Yes, please do. I'm willing to check it.

Regards,    Martin.

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