Re: relative components in absolute paths

[Roy Fielding <fi...@beach.w3.org>]

>Umm. Actually, I think that RFC 1738 is the correct one. Relative URLs
>can only be used within documents, can't they?

No, they can be used almost anywhere URLs are used.   Most of
the URLs used in HTTP are relative.

In any case, I wrote RFC 1808 as a partial replacement of RFC 1738,
because the latter fails to explain how to parse URLs.  The answer
in this case is that relative path components "." and ".." have
no special meaning outside of relative path instances.  The server
must therefore decide how it wants to map //.././././..///././.
references as a location in its namespace.  In almost all cases,
it is best to just issue an error, because otherwise you are
allowing all objects on the server to be addressed by an infinite
number of locations, and this makes indexing and controlling access
to those objects a real pain in the ass.

http URLs are defined in the HTTP specification(s).

 ....Roy