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

["Roy T. Fielding" <[e-mail]>]

> On Dec 13, 2016, at 9:56 AM, Stephen Farrell <[e-mail]> wrote:
> 
> 
> 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.)

FTR, I do not consider the WHATWG spec to be anything other than one
person's semi-formed opinions about how HTML5 browsers ought to process
URL references within the browser environment and populate the "url"
DOM object. They just use misleading terms for doing so. While the five
active browser development groups might be willing to adhere to it,
eventually, the spec disregards all other components of the Web and
the implementation realities of anything not a browser. That is not a
recipe for IETF-style interoperability. It has no relevance for HTTP
server developers (aside from routing bug reports).

One nice thing, though, is that if browsers do eventually implement the
parsing of Unicode-based references with greater consistency, we can
finally write more than just an appendix on how to parse all references
regardless of protocol or media type.  Such a document (developed within
the IETF) could be used to update RFC3986.

....Roy