URI starting with two slashes ... how do they behave?

Question

Lately I saw working code-blocks like this:

<script type="text/javascript" src="//ajax.googleapis.com/ajax/libs/jquery/1.3.2/jquery.min.js"></script>

And according to RFC 2396 (URI Syntax) and RFC 2616 (HTTP 1.1) these URI starting with two slashes are valid, but unfortunately the RFCs don't really explain them.

Can anyone point me to a resource which explains how browsers will/should/do process these URIs?

Answer 1

The resource you're looking for is the RFC 3986.

See Section 4.2 and Section 5.4. Quoting from the latter:

Reference Resolution Examples

Within a representation with a well defined base URI of:

    http://a/b/c/d;p?q

a relative reference is transformed to its target URI as follows:

  "g:h"           =  "g:h"
  "g"             =  "http://a/b/c/g"
  "./g"           =  "http://a/b/c/g"
  "g/"            =  "http://a/b/c/g/"
  "/g"            =  "http://a/g"
  "//g"           =  "http://g"
  "?y"            =  "http://a/b/c/d;p?y"
  "g?y"           =  "http://a/b/c/g?y"
  "#s"            =  "http://a/b/c/d;p?q#s"
  "g#s"           =  "http://a/b/c/g#s"
  "g?y#s"         =  "http://a/b/c/g?y#s"
  ";x"            =  "http://a/b/c/;x"
  "g;x"           =  "http://a/b/c/g;x"
  "g;x?y#s"       =  "http://a/b/c/g;x?y#s"
  ""              =  "http://a/b/c/d;p?q"
  "."             =  "http://a/b/c/"
  "./"            =  "http://a/b/c/"
  ".."            =  "http://a/b/"
  "../"           =  "http://a/b/"
  "../g"          =  "http://a/b/g"
  "../.."         =  "http://a/"
  "../../"        =  "http://a/"
  "../../g"       =  "http://a/g"

This means that when the base URI is http://a/b/c/d;p?q and you use //g, the relative reference is transformed to http://g.