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

[Stephen Farrell <[e-mail]>]

On 10/24/2012 11:36 AM, Jari Arkko wrote:
> Ted, Ian,
> 
>> Un-marked context shifts are
>> likely, and likely to be bad.  Avoiding them by picking a new term is
>> both easy and appropriate.
> 
> FWIW, I agree with Ted's advice above.

Further to that, some guy's fine tool [1] says that
RFC 3986 is referenced by 193 other RFCs. Google
scholar says that RFC 3986 has 2090 citations. [2]
While that's nowhere near the full story, it is
nonetheless significant.

Buggering about with a spec like that whilst only
considering a limited context seems hugely dumb to
me, no matter how good a case you seem to have for
changing bits and pieces of it. So far, I've not seen
the argument for changing 3986, but there do seem
to be good arguments for additional things such as
error-handling specific to the browser context.

I honestly don't get the argument for forking,
and I agree with Ted that that's what's at issue
and would be stupid. I don't know that inventing a
new term is that good an approach either really,
it'd seem better to me to try specify the additional
stuff needed in the whatwg context and then see if
there's any change to 3986 needed and if so, then
propose those changes as an update to the RFC,
following the IETF process. That is not what I
see happening now and I do see an apparent intent
to create the stupid fork that Ted identified.

Getting an update to 3986 through the IETF process
will I'm sure be a huge PITA for whoever does
propose it, since there are so many other dependent
specs. But that's life, and its quite do-able, if
done by someone who's able to handle that kind of
work.

S.

[1] http://www.arkko.com/tools/allstats/citations-rfc3986.html
[2]
http://scholar.google.com/scholar?cites=6121683772362091274&as_sdt=2005&sciodt=0,5&hl=en


> 
>>
>> My personal opinion, as always,
>>
> 
> Mine too.
> 
> Jari
> 
> 
>