Re: file:///c:/nxdist/tut/tutorials.html or file:c:/nxdist/tut/tutorials.html?

[Lennart Borgman]

On Thu, Jul 23, 2009 at 5:17 AM, Stephen J. Turnbull<address@hidden> wrote:
> Lennart Borgman writes:
>  > On Thu, Jul 23, 2009 at 1:19 AM, Davis Herring<address@hidden> wrote:
>  > >> The first form is used by Firefox, the second by Emacs.
>  > >>
>  > >> Are both correct, or?
>  > >
>  > > http://www.ietf.org/rfc/rfc1738.txt says that the file URL scheme looks
>  > > like file://host/path, where host may be empty to indicate localhost.  
> But
>  > > http://www.ietf.org/rfc/rfc1808.txt says that you can have a relative
>
> Please refer to RFC 3986; it obsoletes 2396 (which updated both 1738
> and 1808) and 1808, updates 1738, and is in fact also STD 66, which
> gives you some idea of the importance of and general consensus on the
> updates involved (STD 11 is *still* RFC 822, despite the subsequent
> acceptance of both RFC 2822 and RFC 5322 as PROPOSED STANDARD and
> DRAFT STANDARD respectively!)

I found it impossible to read. I took a quick look at 3986 and it says

  Use of the slash character
   to indicate hierarchy is only required when a URI will be used as the
   context for relative references.  For example, the URI
   <mailto:address@hidden> has a path of "address@hidden", whereas
   the URI <foo://info.example.com?fred> has an empty path.

So I can write

   mailto://address@hidden

but I can't write

  file:c:/my/path/to/my/file.txt

since the latter (or at least part of it) can be used for relative references.

Or, should I read another part of that document instead... ;-)