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

[Keith Howe]

On 4/25/06, Martin Atkins <mart at degeneration.co.uk> wrote:
> Johannes Ernst wrote:
> > On Apr 22, 2006, at 18:41, Martin Atkins wrote:
> >
> >> * Do the canonicalizations from RFC2616 in order that the URL is
> >> actually retrievable.
> >
> > Which canonicalizations are you referring to? Section ...? I can only
> > find things that don't seem to deal with URLs.
>
> To be honest, I don't know. Someone posted a chunk of it in another part
> of this thread and I just snagged the RFC number. I didn't even know
> what that RFC was until a few moments ago. :)

I believe you were seeing my post that referred to section 3.2.3, "URI
Comparison", of RFC 2616:

http://www.w3.org/Protocols/rfc2616/rfc2616-sec3.html#sec3.2.3

RFC 2616 is the HTTP/1.1 protocol spec, but the small chunk in 3.2.3
defines several rules for comparing URIs that were relevant to the
discussion here.

The other RFC I've seen floated so far is RFC 3986, the URI Generic
Syntax. In particular, Section 6, "Normalization and Comparison", is
probably much more complete and authoritative for what we are trying
to accomplish here, though I wasn't aware of it at the time I
mentioned the HTTP one:

http://www.rfc-archive.org/getrfc.php?rfc=3986

- K.Howe