But my question is a little more specific. Should #fragments be counted
as part of the URL for the specific purpose of determining whether they
always refer to the current document, or are appended to whatever the
value of the BASE URL is?
These are two separate questions.
Now, for a question on a tangent. Through reading this list over the past
month or so, I've realized that the HTML spec is not the only document
which defines the HTML standard. Does anyone have a list of all the
relevant RFCs and other documents to which HTML defers? Is this in the
spec, and I just missed it?
>
> RFC1738 tried to avoid the issue of defining the 'fragment'
> identifiers by leaving the # and the stuff outside of it outside of
> the URL. RFC1808 tries to be consistent by defining the fragment
> identifier as 'not part of the URL but associated with it', but it
> leaves the [ "#" fragment ] as part of the URL in the BNF.
>
> Neither document actually defines what the fragment identifier
> *means*: this is presumably left to the HTML spec.
>
> RFC 1808 seems to disallow spaces in #fragments. I think the choices
> are:
>
> 1) HTML disallows spaces in anchors
> 2) RFC 1808 is wrong, or doesn't apply to HTML. Spaces are allowed in anchor references
> 3) Spaces aren't allowed in #fragment identifiers, are encoded, but
> are allowed as name references.
>
> Personally I prefer (1).
>