Examples of Resolving Relative URLs, Part 5

This document has an embedded base URL of
   Content-Base: http:///s//a/b/c
in order to test a notion that Tim Berners-Lee mentioned regarding the ability of URIs to have a triple-slash (or even more slashes) to indicate higher levels of hierarchy than those already used by URLs. This is the same as Part 4, except that the scheme "fred" is replaced with "http" for clients that stupidly change their parsing behavior based on the scheme name.

Tested Clients and Client Libraries

[R]
RFC 2396 (the right way to parse)
Tim
Tim Berners-Lee's proposed interpretation
[1]
Mozilla/4.03 [en] (X11; U; SunOS 5.5 sun4u; Nav)
[2]
Lynx/2.7.1 libwww-FM/2.14
[3]
MSIE 3.01; Windows 95
[4]
NCSA_Mosaic/2.6 (X11;SunOS 4.1.2 sun4m)

Synopsis

RFC 1808 specified that the highest level for relative URLs is indicated by a double-slash "//", and therefore that any triple-slash would be considered a null site component, rather than a higher-level component than the site component (as proposed by Tim).

Draft 09 assumes that a triple-slash means an empty site component, as does Netscape Navigator if the scheme is known. Oddly, Lynx seems to straddle both sides.

Examples

                  RESULTS                       from

g:h            =  g:h                           [R,Tim,2,3]
                  http:///s//a/b/g:h            [1]

g              =  http:///s//a/b/g              [R,Tim,1,2,3]

./g            =  http:///s//a/b/g              [R,Tim,1,2,3]

g/             =  http:///s//a/b/g/             [R,Tim,1,2,3]

/g             =  http:///g                     [R,1,2,3]
                  http:///s//a/g                [Tim]

//g            =  http://g                      [R,1,2,3]
                  http:///s//g                  [Tim]

//g/x          =  http://g/x                    [R,1,2,3]
                  http:///s//g/x                [Tim]

///g           =  http:///g                     [R,Tim,1,2,3]

./             =  http:///s//a/b/               [R,Tim,1,2,3]

../            =  http:///s//a/                 [R,Tim,1,2,3]

../g           =  http:///s//a/g                [R,Tim,1,2,3]

../../         =  http:///s//                   [R,1]
                  http:///s//a/../              [Tim,2]
                  http:///s//a/                 [3]

../../g        =  http:///s//g                  [R,1]
                  http:///s//a/../g             [Tim,2]
                  http:///s//a/g                [3]

../../../g     =  http:///s/g                   [R,1]
                  http:///s//a/../../g          [Tim,2]
                  http:///s//a/g                [3]

../../../../g  =  http:///g                     [R,1]
                  http:///s//a/../../../g       [Tim,2]
                  http:///s//a/g                [3]