GAT Documentation

Grid Application Toolkit

A simple API for Grid Applications

Menu

Java

Java-Reference

General

GridLab - WP-1
Links

Next: Security Up: URI's Relative and Absolute Previous: Opaque Absolute URI's Contents

Relative URI's

Relative URI's allow one to locate a abstract or physical resource relative to a second abstract or physical resource. As this second abstract or physical resource is usually identified by an hierarchical absolute URI, one can think of a relative URI as a means of locating a abstract or physical resource relative to an hierarchical absolute URI.

In practice one is presented with a hierarchical absolute URI of the form

http://www.math.uio.no:666/faq/compression-faq/part1.html

say, then is given a relative URI of the form

part2.html

Resolving this relative URI against the first hierarchical absolute URI then gives the hierarchical absolute URI

http://www.math.uio.no:666/faq/compression-faq/part2.html

However, if we were to resolve the above relative URI against the hierarchical absolute URI

http://www.slashdot.org/index.html

we would obtain the following hierarchical absolute URI

http://www.slashdot.org/part2.html

As you can see the process of resolving a relative URI with respect to a hierarchical absolute URI is child's play.

Usually this resolution process is used within HTML documents. A given HTML document may refer to a second HTML document using a relative URI. The hierarchical absolute URI with which this relative URI is to be resolved against is, for the majority of the cases, understood to be that of the containing document. So, for example, if in the HTML document with the hierarchical absolute URI

http://www.math.uio.no:666/faq/compression-faq/part1.html

there existed a reference to another HTML document of the form

<a href="part2.html">Want more? I dare you!</a>

then this reference would refer to the hierarchical absolute URI

http://www.math.uio.no:666/faq/compression-faq/part2.html

Next: Security Up: URI's Relative and Absolute Previous: Opaque Absolute URI's Contents

Andre Merzky 2004-05-13