Sam Ruby wrote:
Apparently, consuming tools are welcome to aggressively substitute references to the enclosing parent document of any element for any references that, when resolved according to xml:base, differ from that xml:base only in ways that deal with normalization and fragment identifiers. This can only cause confusion if the xml:base in effect differs from original xml:base of the document (i.e., the URI used to retrieve the document in the first place) in ways other than the fragment identifier.
You've nailed it.
Note that I'm sidestepping all questions about who is right or wrong.
I totally agree, there is no right or wrong here. The established usage of a base URI is so different from what Roy is saying that he shouldn't have changed the RFC in such a way. (The RFC is even an Internet Standard, defined as "a specification that is stable and well-understood.")
The recommendations produced by the feed validator will focus on the areas where the user is most likely to stumble into this problem. It seems to me that the largest problem area is at the feed level, and the recommendation will be to either make xml:base at the feed level match the URI from which the feed was loaded, or (paradoxically enough) to reference a resource that you are unlikely to directly reference later in the document. Referencing a parent directory of any given document is OK, what's important is that it isn't the document itself.
Yes, although I wonder how you would test for "unlikely to directly reference later".
Fair enough?
Totally, thanks! -- Sjoerd Visscher http://w3future.com/weblog/
