Re: Web spaces of strange topology. Where?

Michael De La Rue (mikedlr@indy.unipress.waw.pl)
Fri, 17 May 1996 14:35:21 +0200 (MDT)


Strange the way these technical mailing lists all go quiet the minute
anyone mentions anything on topic isn't it? ;-) Wonder if I've
offended everyone...

My question was approximately if anyone knows of a place where

http://www.foo.com/x/y/../z isn't the same as
http://www.foo.com/x/z

The one thing that has come up that I would like to clarify, is I mean
real URLs in real documents. I'm aware of things like ftp sites where
you can't directly reverse a directory change.

but I'm looking for places where someone might be referencing across
these problems..

say we had

ftp://sunsite.icm.edu.pl/pub/Linux/ftp.cs.helsinki.fi/index.html

should be such an example

and it referenced

../../pub3/ (it dosen't of course)

that would be what I was looking for.

It would be impossible _IN PRACTICE_ to consider this URL equal to

ftp://sunsite.icm.edu.pl/pub/pub3/

because it isn't

but I think I have never seen such a URL. If anyone knows that they don't
exist I'd be interested... if anyone knows where they do exist I'd also
be really interested. If the reason everyone is being quiet is because
they've never seen this, then I'd like to know why Tim Bray (related, I
think to one of the search engines. I've only got a quote in another
message handy) said in a message a while ago (see the list archives) that
knowing the real meaning of /xxxx/./../x/../y/ is a problem.

Michael

<http://www.tardis.ed.ac.uk/~mikedlr/biography.html>
Scottish Climbing Archive: <http://www.tardis.ed.ac.uk/~mikedlr/climbing/>
Linux/Unix clone@ftp://src.doc.ic.ac.uk/packages/linux/sunsite.unc-mirror/docs/