--On Friday, July 7, 2017 10:42 +1000 Mark Andrews
<marka@xxxxxxx> wrote:
>> The same subsection of RFC 3986 also uses the term "host
>> subcomponent" for what you are referring to as a name and
>> allows it to be a "registered name" (or <reg-name>) that
>> might not be a DNS name or reference at all -- whether it is
>> or not is scheme-dependent.
>...
> Which really should never have been allowed. Beyound the UI
> everything should be absolute. Relative names in URI really
> don't work in practice because search lists are not
> constistent even inside a single organisation.
Mark, it is no secret that I'm not a fan of relative URIs or of
3986 generally. But the latter is, for better or worse, a full
standard that went through the IETF process. If you think it
is seriously flawed, I'd encourage you to write in I-D to fix it
and see if you can get it through the system. My experience
predicts that any attempt to do such a thing will produce an
outcry about the astronomical number of web pages that contain
and depend on such references and the only slightly smaller
number of them that are used every day, but maybe you will do
better than I did when I tried to get something with far
narrower scope through the system.
> I had my ISP hand me a relative link for their support pages.
> IT DID NOT WORK. There support line got a call complaining
> about it.
With the above in mind, so? The number of links most of us see
a week that don't work --whether the references are relative or
absolute-- is rather too large to view one failure as horrible
breakage in the model.
john