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

[Ian Hickson <[e-mail]>]

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, complaining 
that we're doing it instead is going to fall on deaf ears and be met with 
the rolling of eyeballs.


> there is no consensus that there is a "mess" to fix related to URIs.

The specs don't define everything that implementations have to do to be 
interoperable. If the IETF doesn't think that's a problem, then that's 
fine, but then y'all shouldn't be surprised when people who _do_ think 
that's a problem try and fix it.


On Mon, 22 Oct 2012, Roy T. Fielding wrote:
> 
> What you are insisting on defining as a "URL" is the input to the 
> process of making a hypertext reference (the arbitrary string typed into 
> a dialog or placed inside an href/src attribute)

Or placed on a command line to wget(1), or put in an RDFa triple store, or 
in transmitted in an HTTP Location: header, or...


> whereas the IETF standards define the output of that process as a 
> uniform addressing syntax for use on the Internet by every application 
> that makes use of Web addresses.

That's what Anne is specifying, because, despite your claims, STD 66 
doesn't actually define that. It only defines processing for valid 
strings, not invalid ones.


> Browsers implement both the input processing and the output URI 
> standards.  HTML must define the input processing, either within the 
> spec or by reference to a new spec.

This has nothing particularly to do with HTML, HTML is just one of many 
many contexts in which URLs are found.


> "" is not a URL.

Whether it's a valid URL or not is besides the point (it's like people 
claiming that invalid XML files aren't XML, a pointless argument). We 
still have to define the processing for such a string when software is to 
process it as a URL.


> > I'm sure Anne would love nothing more than to be able to work on 
> > something more interesting that this. But at the end of the day, 
> > someone has to do it, and y'all aren't doing it.
> > 
> > This should not come as a surprise to anyone, the IETF and W3C have 
> > been discussing this matter at last as far back as 2008.
> 
> Yes, we have been discussing it since 1994.

19 years of not fixing the problem, then. Shouldn't come as a surprise 
that someone has finally gotten around to doing it.


> It would be nice if you would take the advice already received and 
> define references in HTML, including the algorithms for converting them 
> into URI references (for DOM and network usage) and IRI references (for 
> display).

As far as HTML goes, my plan is to remove all references to STD 66 and 
rely entirely on Anne's work, so that there doesn't have to be any 
preprocessing nonsense. Then the STD 66 RFCs are entirely irrelevant.

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