URI::file not RFC 1738 compliant?

As far as I can tell, RFC 1738, section 3.10, as well as the BNF in
section 5 explicitly say that file: URI must have two forward slashes
before the optional hostname, followed by another forward slash, and
then the path.

However:

  $ perl -MURI::file -e 'print URI::file->new_abs("/foo"), "\n"'
  file:/foo

I would have expected "file:///foo".  These "one-slash" file: URIs cause
various interoperability problems here and there with applications or
other libraries that require strict RFC compliance.  For example,
XML::LibXML::SAX seems to treat "file:/foo" as a literal relative path
from the current directory (ie. "$PWD/file:/foo"), whereas "file:///foo"
works with it as expected.

Would it be possible to have this fixed in URI?