Proposal (Was: When are and aren't two URLs the same?)

[Thomas Broyer]

2006/4/24, Carl Howells <chowells at janrain.com>:
> > How about the case when there are . or .. components in the absolute path part of an URL?
> > Including when those which are trailing without a slash.
> >
> > E.g. Should http://example.org/users/joe and http://example.org/users/foo/../joe be the same?
> > What about http://alice.example.com/ vs http://alice.example.com/.
> >
>
> Nothing should be done in that case.  Those pairs of URLs aren't the
> same, even is some servers will provide the same content for them.  Just
> because the path section of a URL looks like a Unix path doesn't mean
> that it is or should be treated as a Unix path.

Look at the example in section 6.2.2 of RFC3986.

Actually, it would be a bug to assume those are different URIs, based
on section 6.2.2.3 of that very same RFC, reproduced here for
completeness:

6.2.2.3. Path Segment Normalization

   The complete path segments "." and ".." are intended only for use
   within relative references (Section 4.1) and are removed as part of
   the reference resolution process (Section 5.2).  However, some
   deployed implementations incorrectly assume that reference resolution
   is not necessary when the reference is already a URI and thus fail to
   remove dot-segments when they occur in non-relative paths.  URI
   normalizers should remove dot-segments by applying the
   remove_dot_segments algorithm to the path, as described in
   Section 5.2.4.


--
Thomas Broyer