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

[Ian Hickson <[e-mail]>]

On Tue, 23 Oct 2012, Mark Nottingham wrote:
> 
> Don't much care about the venue, as long as there's *some* coordination 
> / communication.

Everyone is welcome to participate in the WHATWG list.


> > Doing the work as a diff spec? That's what we did for a while, but it 
> > doesn't work. Having to reference three specs (pre-parse, IRI, URI) 
> > just to parse and resolve a URL is not what leads to implementors 
> > having a good time and thus not what leads to interop.
> 
> Really? You're comfortable with the current weight and depth of the 
> HTML5 spec, but balk at a pre-processing step for URIs? Seriously?

Good lord, no. Who's comfortable with the HTML spec's size?

Unfortunately, the size of the HTML spec is dictated by the complexity of 
the platform it is describing.

There's no reason to have three specs when one suffices.


> The underlying point that people seem to be making is that there's 
> legitimate need for URIs to be a separate concept from "strings that 
> will become URIs."

Anne's spec will define "valid URL", which addressed that need.


> By collapsing them into one thing, you're doing those folks a 
> disservice.

They are not collapsed into one thing.


> Browser implementers may not care, but it's pretty obvious that lots of 
> other people do.

Browser implementors aren't particularly special here.


> BTW, it doesn't have to be a separate spec, although it probably would 
> benefit from being one. Browser implementers already have to reference 
> TCP, IP, DNS, and likely tens to hundreds of other specs to get what 
> they want done -- unless you have bigger plans?

The difference is that the DNS implementor doesn't need to implement TCP, 
he uses TCP (and UDP) and builds on it. And so on. Whereas here we're 
talking about one thing, URLs, being specified in one place vs three.

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