Re:

At 10:15 AM 10/2/00 -0500, Paul Grosso wrote:
>I found a mention of fragment identifier and the # separator in
>RFC 2396 [1], but I'm still looking for the discussion of the ?
>and | separator (especially, whether they require/allow the entire
>resource to be downloaded first or not and exactly where/by whom
>the bit after the | or ? should get processed).  Can someone give
>pointers to the specs that answer these questions?  (I've already
>looked at RFC 1738, 1808, and 2396.)  Thanks.
>
>[1] ftp://ftp.ietf.org/rfc/rfc2396.txt

The "query component" (starting with a ?) is discussed in RFC 2396, but I'm 
surprised, on reading this now, that it doesn't say more about the 
server/user agent distinction.  It does say "The query component is a 
string of information to be interpreted by the resource", and perhaps 
that's 2396-speak meaning that it's information to be interpreted by the 
system that serves the resource.

The | separator was invented out of whole cloth in an early version of 
XLL/XLink; when we (the W3C XML Linking WG) broke out the XPointer stuff 
into its own spec, the | went away because we had been inappropriately 
messing with basic URI functionality.  Once we got on the track of defining 
a fragment identifier language for a particular set of media types, the 
scope became somewhat simpler and clearer.

         Eve
--
Eve Maler                                          +1 781 442 3190
Sun Microsystems XML Technology Center    eve.maler @ east.sun.com