OA2.0d11: Minor nit-pick regarding normalization

Martin Atkins mart at degeneration.co.uk
Fri Feb 2 07:57:20 UTC 2007


Hi,

This is a really minor thing I just spotted due to leaving my browser 
open on the relevant part of the spec and coming back to it later. :)

The normalization table in appendix A.1 lists several examples of the 
normalization of URIs. The last few examples are as follows:

     http://example4.com/ => http://example4.com/
     https://example5.com/ => https://example5.com/
     example6.com => http://example6.com

I believe that the last example should instead normalize to:
     http://example6.com/

* A HTTP URL without a path is a nonsense because the protocol doesn't 
allow for an empty path anyway. (You can't GET <empty string> HTTP/1.1)

* It's causes http://example6.com/ and example6.com to normalize to 
different strings, which is counter-intuitive.

* There is no useful reason to omit that slash except that the 
currently-specced normalization rules exclude it.


Therefore there should be an extra provision in section 7.2:

  * If the resulting identifier is an HTTP or HTTPS URL and it contains 
only the two slashes after the protocol specifier, an additional slash 
MUST be appended to the end of the string.

(not fussy on the exact wording.)





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