[Python-Dev] Path object design

[Steve Holden]

Fredrik Lundh wrote:
> Andrew Dalke wrote:
> 
> 
>>>as I said, today's urljoin doesn't guarantee that the output is
>>>the *shortest* possible way to represent the resulting URI.
>>
>>I didn't think anyone was making that claim.  The module claims
>>RFC 1808 compliance.  From the docstring:
>>
>>    DESCRIPTION
>>        See RFC 1808: "Relative Uniform Resource Locators", by R. Fielding,
>>        UC Irvine, June 1995.
>>
>>Now quoting from RFC 1808:
>>
>>   5.2.  Abnormal Examples
>>
>>   Although the following abnormal examples are unlikely to occur in
>>   normal practice, all URL parsers should be capable of resolving them
>>   consistently.
> 
> 
>>My claim is that "consistent" implies "in the spirit of the rest of the RFC"
>>and "to a human trying to make sense of the results" and not only
>>mean "does the same thing each time."  Else
>>
>>
>>>>>urljoin("http://blah.com/", "../../..")
>>
>>'http://blah.com/there/were/too/many/dot-dot/path/elements/in/the/relative/url'
>>
>>would be equally consistent.
> 
> 
> perhaps, but such an urljoin wouldn't pass the
> 
>      minimize(base + relative) == minimize(urljoin(base, relative))
> 
> test that today's urljoin passes (where "minimize" is defined as "create 
> the shortest possible URI that identifies the same target, according to 
> the relevant RFC").
> 
> isn't the real issue in this subthread whether urljoin should be 
> expected to pass the
> 
>      minimize(base + relative) == urljoin(base, relative)
> 
> test?
> 
I should hope that *is* the issue, and I should further hope that the 
general wish would be for it to pass that test. Of course web systems 
have been riddled with canonicalization errors in the past, so it'd be 
best if you and/or Andrew could provide a minimize() implementation :-)

regards
  Steve
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