Re: Last Call: <draft-holsten-about-uri-scheme-06.txt> (The 'about' URI scheme) to Proposed Standard

[Julian Reschke <[e-mail]>]

On 2011-06-17 06:01, Barry Leiba wrote:
>> More substantively, I fail to understand how this specification
>> proposes to create a class of "reserved" about: URIs when the about:
>> scheme seems to be internal information to an application.  I think
>> the Security Considerations section doesn't address any of that, and
>> probably ought to, particularly in light of the proposal to add text
>> that users ought not to depend on "standard" behaviour.
>
> Yes... I'm actually very confused about the point of this document.
> It's documenting a URI scheme that's used ONLY internally, and,
> therefore, has no interoperability requirements.  As best I can tell,
> the issue here is to let browser makers know what other browsers do,
> so that maybe new browsers will decide to do the same things.  That's
> fine, and that helps users have a consistent experience across
> browsers.  But it strikes me as Informational, not Standards Track.
> MUSTs and MUST NOTs seem completely out of place here, to me.
>
> If different browsers exhibit different behaviour with the same
> about:xxxx URI, that's as it is, and the variations should be
> documented.  Developers of new browsers will have to decide which
> older browsers to emulate.
>
> But none of this actually speaks to interoperability among browsers or
> web servers or applications or....
> ...

The reason this whole activity is started is...

   <http://www.w3.org/TR/2011/WD-html5-20110525/syntax.html#the-doctype>

which "defines"

   about:legacy-compat

for which interoperable behavior is required from browsers.

Best regards, Julian