“Theory” of URLs for developers – Terra Informatica Software

We are using URLs these days quite a lot, but not all of us understand what they actually are.

By this post I will try to explain their structure and how Sciter/HTMLayout deals with them.
Please note that this is sort of informal explanation and I am using term “URL” here while “URI” is more correct name for that entity strictly speaking.

URLs are made from these 5 major parts:

<scheme name> : [//] <resource identification > [ ? <query> ] [ # <fragment> ]

Where:

scheme name – is in principle any name token – name of the URL scheme. Some of names are well known: “file:”, “http:”, etc.
// part – if present, means that the following “resource identification” part uses hierarchical naming convention, with ‘/’ character as a delimiter.
resource identification – is either ‘/’ separated path name if ‘//’ is provided. Or it is some “flat” name.
query part is in principle meaningful only for dynamic client/server scenarios. It is an instruction to the server to provide that resources with those parameters.
fragment – is a name or ID of some sort that identifies some location or part inside the resource.

Consider that you have the same HTML test-file.html available from these three locations:

file:///c:/test-folder/test-file.htm
http://example.com/test-folder/test-file.htm
res:test-file.htm

Let’s imagine that the document contains image with relative path:

  <html>
  <img src="image.png">
  </html>

Sciter, while loading the document, will resolve relative path name “image.png” to these:

file:///c:/test-folder/image.png – as base URL is hierarchical one.
http://example.com/test-folder/image.png – ditto.
res:image.png – but here only resource schema is inherited as base URL uses “flat” naming convention.

In principle your Sciter application can use your own URL schema. You just need to decide will it be hierarchical or flat.

For example if you will call SciterLoadHtml(html, "app://module/main.htm"); then all relative links inside that document
will be resolved against app://module/ base name. So in your SCN_LOAD_DATA handler you will get: “app://module/images/img1.png”, “app://module/styles.css” and so on.

But if you plan to put all your files into resource section of your executable then you should use “flat” schema, like “res:”.

And the last note: if you use hierarchical URLs in SciterLoadHtml and SciterLoadFile calls then these urls must be absolute ones otherwise Sciter will not be able to resolve them reliably.

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