nsIURI Interface

 URIs are essentially structured names for things -- anything. This interface
 provides accessors to set and query the most basic components of an URI.
 Subclasses, including nsIURL, impose greater structure on the URI.

 This interface follows Tim Berners-Lee's URI spec (RFC2396) [1], where the
 basic URI components are defined as such:
 <pre> 
      ftp://username:password@hostname:portnumber/pathname
      \ /   \               / \      / \        /\       /
       -     ---------------   ------   --------  -------
       |            |             |        |         |
       |            |             |        |        Path
       |            |             |       Port         
       |            |            Host      /
       |         UserPass                 /
     Scheme                              /
       \                                /
        --------------------------------
                       |
                    PrePath
 </pre>
 The definition of the URI components has been extended to allow for
 internationalized domain names [2] and the more generic IRI structure [3].

 [1] http://www.ietf.org/rfc/rfc2396.txt
 [2] http://www.ietf.org/internet-drafts/draft-ietf-idn-idna-06.txt
 [3] http://www.ietf.org/internet-drafts/draft-masinter-url-i18n-08.txt


 nsIURI - interface for an uniform resource identifier w/ i18n support.

 AUTF8String attributes may contain unescaped UTF-8 characters.
 Consumers should be careful to escape the UTF-8 strings as necessary, but
 should always try to "display" the UTF-8 version as provided by this
 interface.

 AUTF8String attributes may also contain escaped characters.
 
 Unescaping URI segments is unadvised unless there is intimate
 knowledge of the underlying charset or there is no plan to display (or
 otherwise enforce a charset on) the resulting URI substring.

 The correct way to create an nsIURI from a string is via
 nsIIOService.newURI.
 
 @status FROZEN

[scriptable, uuid(07a22cc0-0ce5-11d3-9331-00104ba0fd40)]

Attributes

 The URI host with an ASCII compatible encoding.  Follows the IDNA
 draft spec for converting internationalized domain names (UTF-8) to
 ASCII for compatibility with existing internet infrasture.

readonly attribute ACString asciiHost

 Additional attributes:


 The URI spec with an ASCII compatible encoding.  Host portion follows
 the IDNA draft spec.  Other parts are URL-escaped per the rules of
 RFC2396.  The result is strictly ASCII.

readonly attribute ACString asciiSpec

 The host is the internet domain name to which this URI refers.  It could
 be an IPv4 (or IPv6) address literal.  If supported, it could be a
 non-ASCII internationalized domain name.

 Characters are NOT escaped.

attribute AUTF8String host

 The host:port (or simply the host, if port == -1).

 Characters are NOT escaped.

attribute AUTF8String hostPort

 The charset of the document from which this URI originated.  An empty
 value implies UTF-8.

 If this value is something other than UTF-8 then the URI components
 (e.g., spec, prePath, username, etc.) will all be fully URL-escaped.
 Otherwise, the URI components may contain unescaped multibyte UTF-8
 characters.

readonly attribute ACString originCharset

attribute AUTF8String password

 The path, typically including at least a leading '/' (but may also be
 empty, depending on the protocol).

 Some characters may be escaped.

attribute AUTF8String path

 A port value of -1 corresponds to the protocol's default port (eg. -1
 implies port 80 for http URIs).

attribute long port

 The prePath (eg. scheme://user:password@host:port) returns the string
 before the path.  This is useful for authentication or managing sessions.

 Some characters may be escaped.

readonly attribute AUTF8String prePath

 The Scheme is the protocol to which this URI refers.  The scheme is
 restricted to the US-ASCII charset per RFC2396.  Setting this is
 highly discouraged outside of a protocol handler implementation, since
 that will generally lead to incorrect results.

attribute ACString scheme

 The URI is broken down into the following principal components:


 Returns a string representation of the URI. Setting the spec causes
 the new spec to be parsed per the rules for the scheme the URI
 currently has.  In particular, setting the spec to a URI string with a
 different scheme will generally produce incorrect results; no one
 outside of a protocol handler implementation should be doing that.  If
 the URI stores information from the nsIIOService.newURI call used to
 create it other than just the parsed string, then behavior of this
 information on setting the spec attribute is undefined.

 Some characters may be escaped.

attribute AUTF8String spec

 The username:password (or username only if value doesn't contain a ':')

 Some characters may be escaped.

attribute AUTF8String userPass

 The optional username and password, assuming the preHost consists of
 username:password.

 Some characters may be escaped.

attribute AUTF8String username

Methods

 Clones the current URI.  For some protocols, this is more than just an
 optimization.  For example, under MacOS, the spec of a file URL does not
 necessarily uniquely identify a file since two volumes could share the
 same name.

nsIURI clone()

 An URI supports the following methods:


 URI equivalence test (not a strict string comparison).

 eg. http://foo.com:80/ == http://foo.com/

boolean equals(in nsIURI other)

 This method resolves a relative string into an absolute URI string,
 using this URI as the base. 

 NOTE: some implementations may have no concept of a relative URI.

AUTF8String resolve(in AUTF8String relativePath)

 An optimization to do scheme checks without requiring the users of nsIURI
 to GetScheme, thereby saving extra allocating and freeing. Returns true if
 the schemes match (case ignored).

boolean schemeIs(in string scheme)