How is it wrong? How is what I've said different from what
you've said below?
>For good reason, RFC 1808 makes *no* requirement that a document
>containing relative URLs be retrievable via *any* URL, much less its
>"base URL". The "base URL", by definition, serves strictly as a
>device for resolving relative URLs imbedded in the document. The
>examples in the RFC amply show the need for this more flexible
>approach.
>It's true that the most common case in Web practice is a document
>obtained via an idempotent URL, having no explicitly specified base
>URL. In that case, yes, retrieval of the base URL is guaranteed to
>yield the same object
"same object"? strange phrasing. In my book, object=resource, and
they're the same if they have the same address/URL/URI, by definition.
"Same entity?" is a more precise question, but the answer depends on
whether the document changes over time etc.
> as that in which the relative URLs are being
>resolved, and the HTML spec's "optimization" of "#name" is correct.
>But otherwise not.
Who said anything about "retrieval of the base URL is guaranteed ..."?
All I said is that the <base> markup provides the base URL used
to turn relative references (including "#name") into absolute URLs.
The point is that you don't _need_ to retrieve a representation of the
resource identified by the base URL: you've already got it!
Dan