JavaScript URI functions – unit tests

This HTML document invokes a set of unit tests for JavaScript functions that resolve URI references to absolute form.

History:

• 4 Jan 2007 – Original version of this document
• 16 Jun 2007 – Fixed reference to TimBL's uri.js, which moved from its original location
• 14 Dec 2011 – Added webr3 URI.resolveReference test and links to jump to each test result
• 24 Jun 2012 – Added note explaining weird results for certain tests
• 15 Oct 2012 – Added link to discussion
• 9 Jul 2014 – Added rudimentary handling of library load failures; rephrased intro note
• 7 Jun 2017 – Use current webr3 code since critical bugs were fixed; catch load failures

Important note:

These tests expect the "wrong" results when merging a relative path with a base URI consisting of just a scheme and a relative path (no leading "/"). The tests affected are 2, 6, 7, and maybe 162.

The expected results are incorrect according to RFC 3986/STD 66, but are actually better than what the algorithm in the spec produces. When RFC 3986/STD 66 was in development, Graham Klyne reported this issue and suggested that the resolution algorithm be adjusted to provide a more reasonable result. There was no argument, so I made my absoluteizeURI() function and these unit tests with the expectation that the final draft of the URI spec would contain a fix for the issue. However, when RFC 3986 was finally published, there was no change to the resolution algorithm.

I finally got around to mentioning this on the URI WG list in Oct. 2012, in response to a post which indicated that there are more JavaScript libraries out there which I could add to this test harness. However, nothing was ever done about it.