[This is getting tiring!]
Why? Please give your argument in full. I believe this _is_ a
degenerate case, and not any sort of deviation. The only special case
is:
|If the URI in the address of the head anchor is the same as the base
|URI, then the base document is sufficient as a representation of the
|resource. A user agent must not, for example, use any network
|information retrieval protocols to obtain a new representation of the
|resourse.
And even that it's a special case, but rather a requirement
that browsers make the obvious optimization in this case.
In other words, '#frag' is not the special case: the special
case is _any_ link to the base URI; for example, if the
base uri is http://www.w3.org/hypertext/WWW/TheProject.html,
then the browser is required to use the already-fetched copy
of the document for all of these:
href="#xyz"
href="../WWW/TheProject.html"
href="./TheProject.html"
href="TheProject.html"
href="TheProject.html#z21"
href="../../hypertext/WWW/TheProject.html"
href="http://www.w3.org/hypertext/WWW/TheProject.html"
As to "identical to" vs. "the same as," they mean exactly the same
thing to me, so I'm willing to use whichever you prefer. I don't see
where the confusion lies though. Two URIs are the same if they are the
same sequence of characters; else they are not the same. It's not like
this is lisp, with EQ, EQL, and EQUAL.
Dan