Re: [whatwg] New URL Standard from Anne van Kesteren on 2012-09-24 ([e-mail] from September 2012)

[Ian Hickson <[e-mail]>]

On Mon, 24 Sep 2012, Peter Saint-Andre wrote:
>
> It's also not clear to me what the WHATWG HTML Living Standard [1] 
> really means by "willful violation"
> http://www.whatwg.org/specs/web-apps/current-work/multipage/introduction.html#willful-violation

Can you elaborate on how the definition you cite there in the spec is 
unclear? I'm not sure how to make it clearer.


> e.g., is it just an allowance for APIs and browser software to not be 
> completely strict about processing some input for the sake of backward 
> compatibility with existing (messy) web content, or is it an active 
> attempt at redefining core protocols?

The spec seems pretty clear that it's the latter ("conflicting needs have 
led to this specification violating the requirements of these other 
specifications").


> However, it is interesting that the willful violations are not limited 
> to RFC 3986: the spec also mentions willful violations of RFC 2046, RFC 
> 2616, RFC 2781, RFC 5322, EcmaScript, XPath, XSLT, and Unicode. Quite a 
> list...

Yeah. Turns out we (the Web standards community) haven't been doing such a 
great job of making our specificatiosn match reality. :-(

-- 
Ian Hickson               U+1047E                )\._.,--....,'``.    fL
http://ln.hixie.ch/       U+263A                /,   _.. \   _\  ;`._ ,.
Things that are impossible just take longer.   `._.-(,_..'--(,_..'`-.;.'