Description of Problem: Args to -I, -X aren't normalized. It's debatable how far this should go, since URLs are not exactly the same as paths in terms of semantics. In particular, whether a target URL should be normalized is iffy, at best. However, path args to -I, -X most likely correspond directly to real paths in the server space, and should be subject to common pathname normalization techniques. By this I mean, elimination of /foo/.. sequences, and elimination of "." components. Without this, the feature doesn't really work right, since inclusion/exclusion is done by string comparison. This affects all versions of wget >= 1.6 in all applicable RH releases I'll work up a patch against 1.7 and send it in sometime in the next couple of days (it's not that hard ... I've patched wget enough I know my way around the code pretty well. It's kinda messy, due to complexity, but well written.) Note that this only is an issue when you're mechanically generating args to wget, like when doing "form scraping", since I don't think most people are perverse enough to deliberately enter in a non-normalized path as an arg to -I or -X, and it's definitely something you'd have to consciously make an effort to do.
I'm not sure I think it should be normalized - if you can convice the wget authors, it will be, but until then I don't see it as a problem. Also, if the level is implemented as a symlink it may not correspond foo/../bar may be different from bar/
OK, that last bit (which was what I was getting at with URLs having different semantics) convinces me it's not a good idea. AFA convincing the wget authors of anything, I've never been able to convince them to even answer email, or acknowledge a bug report or a patch, let alone agree with something. Maybe it's just several isolated occurrences (isn't that a contradiction?), but they don't seem to acknowledge any contact from the outside world at all.
Last time I sent in a (trivial) patch, I got a response after a couple of months so they are acking, just with a high latency. You might have better luck on the wget mailing list, if anything like that exists.