Re: [art] Stephen Farrell's Discuss on draft-ietf-appsawg-file-scheme-15: (with DISCUSS)

[Stephen Farrell <[e-mail]>]

Hi Dave,

On 13/12/16 17:45, Dave Crocker wrote:
> On 12/13/2016 8:45 AM, Stephen Farrell wrote:
>> AFAIK (though I could be wrong) this would be the first time
>> the IESG would have approved a proposed standard that directly
>> duplicates text that is on the whatwg's web page [1]
> ...
>> [1] http://url.spec.whatwg.org/
> 
> 
> Steve,
> 
> Thanks.  And yes, this is interesting.
> 
> However your citation is to a long document and what we need to assess
> this sort of issue is some precision about what is being duplicated.

Given that [1] is liable to change at any time, and that that
is a deliberate decision and goal of the authors of [1] the
fact that there isn't a specific divergence today for the file
scheme is not the only concern. Note: I'm not saying (here)
that the IETF approach to documents is better than whatwg's
just that they differ. As does the scope of 3986 and updates
vs. [1].

The potential divergence between (some?) web developers
following [1] and other folks following RFCs is my main issue.
(The IESG and IAB and W3C liaisons engaged on trying to get
this fixed a while back. No success on that sadly.)

> 
> The IETF draft isn't an exact duplicate of the whatwg url spec, if only
> because the IETF draft has undergone extensive revision within the IETF.
> 
> So knowing exactly which text replicates exactly which text would help.

I didn't say there was such a direct conflict for this draft.
(TBH I actually don't recall if there is, it's been ages since
I read [1].)

> 
> It's clearly not a direct 'role' conflict about the basic purpose of
> each specification, since one document is for URLs and the other is for
> file schemes.
> 
> Further, the file scheme draft has very few occurrences of the string
> "URL" (3 of which are in the whatwg citation and none that are
> normative) -- and none seem to be normative(!)
> 
> The whatwg URL spec does contain a registry-ish entry for a 'file'
> scheme and some text that might be intended to serve as a specification,
> though it's quite terse.

Yeah, that is a pretty clear conflict with the IANA registry for
schemes.

> 
> So we still need to refine the problem statement.

I don't think we do. There may be further detailed problems for
the file scheme, but the discuss point I've raised is to ask the
IESG to consider whether or not we're gonna grin and bear this
particular kind of (IMO possibly damaging) duplication. I suspect
that the only practical answer is to do just that for at least
the time for which [1] is considered useful to web developers.

S.

[1] is the same [1] as before:-)


> 
> d/
>