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

["Murray S. Kucherawy" <[e-mail]>]

> -----Original Message-----
> From: [e-mail] [mailto:[e-mail]] On Behalf Of Barry Leiba
> Sent: Thursday, June 16, 2011 9:01 PM
> To: Andrew Sullivan
> Cc: [e-mail]; IETF Discussion;
> Julian Reschke; Boris Zbarsky; Alexey Melnikov
> Subject: Re: Last Call: <draft-holsten-about-uri-scheme-06.txt> (The
> 'about' URI scheme) to Proposed Standard
> 
> 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....

I suppose adding it as an IANA-registered scheme, referencing something that's Informational, is a reasonable way for a new browser implementer to be reminded that support for such a scheme is common and probably expected.

But if we feel that's either not useful or not the IETF's place (or not a valid use of the IANA scheme registry), then I'm left to +1 Barry's comments above.

-MSK