Suggestion for HTML

Rob Hartill (hartill@ooo.lanl.gov)
Thu, 13 Oct 94 10:35:24 MDT


Hi,

I asked on www-talk for clarification on how BASE is supposed to be
interpreted, with regard to how Xmosaic interprets it, and was
advised to write here to make a suggestion...

At our site we make use of the Xmosaic interpretation - or at least
the way they implement it, to achieve a result which can't (as far as I
can see) be achieved by other methods..

With Xmosaic, if a document contains a BASE URL, then as well as
using this to resolve relative URLs, Xmosaic replaces the current URL
with the BASE - this means that a RELOAD is performed on the BASE URL
(not the current one), and hotlists use the BASE URL to.

So what does this mean ?

We can use Xmosaic's implementation to allow documents to provide
alternative URLs for themsleves - e.g. we have scripts which accept
POSTed forms, which use BASE to provide a URL for the same document
using GET (by adding PATH_INFO and/or a QUERY_STRING) - this means that
the URL can be hotlisted, or used as a link from another document.

If BASE is going to keep its current definition, I think we need to
add a new element, perhaps call it URL or URI, so that if a document
has say,

<HEAD>
<URL HREF="http://x.y.z/d/e">
</HEAD>

then it identifies its prefered URL to retrieve the document as

http://x.y.z/d/e

Then the client uses this URL for reloads or setting bookmarks.

How can I get this into the HTML spec ?

regards,
rob.

--
Robert Hartill            (hartill@lanl.gov)
Los Alamos National Laboratory               T-8 office: (505) 667 5336
Theoretical Division, T-8, MS B285                  Fax: (505) 667 5585
P.O. Box 1663
Los Alamos, NM 87545, U.S.A.