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

[Ted Hardie <[e-mail]>]

On Mon, Oct 22, 2012 at 2:46 PM, Ian Hickson <[e-mail]> wrote:
> On Mon, 22 Oct 2012, Julian Reschke wrote:
>> >
>> > I couldn't agree more! We've been waiting for four years for the URI
>> > working group to get their act together and fix the URL mess. Nothing
>> > has happened. We lost patience and are now doing it ourselves. ...
>>
>> Clarifying: there is no URI Working Group, and as far as I can tell,
>
> Whoever. The people complaining that it should be done at the IETF haven't
> done any work. That's the complaint. Until they do the work,

Handing things off to the IETF and saying "please go do this work" has
a very low success rate, because that's not how the IETF works.  The
IETF works by bringing together folks interested in solving a
particular problem and putting them in a larger context; that context
can help those working on a point solution see other aspects of their
problem space.  It also provides a set of processes which can be
useful for decision making when the trade-offs may involve different
folks' oxes being gored.

In this case, the concern is that defining what you are doing as a
revision of the URL standard outside the IETF will:

* lose that larger context
* use a process which has a bias toward browser viewpoints, which
raises concerns about trade-offs outside that space
* generate a fork, either directly or in the creation of two
communities which understand URL to be either a subset of URI in the
STD 66 sense or the "input string to web identifier" sense that Anne's
work uses.

It's tedious when people say "you should come here and do the work",
and I apologize that I'm about to say it.  But for work which
redefines IETF standards, the IETF is really the place to do it, and
preserving that context is important to making sure that the
communities of use retain a single standard.  I share your frustration
with the pace of work on related topics, but I urge you to put energy
into the process rather than simply appropriating the term.

If you choose not call what you're doing a "URL" but by some other
term ("fleen" is my favorite), then the issue does not arise; at most,
someone needs to later define how a fleen and URL relate, but that's
much less likely to cause confusion.

My two cents, as an individual as always,

Ted