the "HTML URL" issue, was: Why Microsoft's authoritative=true won't work and is a bad idea

Henrik Nordstrom wrote:
> On mån, 2008-07-07 at 18:56 -0400, Justin James wrote:
> 
>> The problem with the concept of HTML specifying its own URLs, from my
>> viewpoint, is that developers need one standard to follow, not 3 (URI,
>> IRI, HTTP URL). 
> 
> But I am still not aware of the problem which triggered this. I linger
> on the HTTP WG, not the HTML one.. and is therefore unaware of what
> problem HTTP URL/URI/IRI specifications cause for HTML.
> ...

See thread at <http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/uri/2008Jun/0088.html>.

Key issues:

1) there are non-IRI identifiers in HTML in use (such as using space 
characters)

2) UAs do not use UTF-8 consistently when mapping non-ASCII characters 
in query parameters (they may use the document encoding instead)

3) there is no defined error handling in URI/IRI (I do not agree that 
this is a problem with URI/IRI)

1) and 2) can be solved by defining a transformation from HTML URL to 
IRI. HTML5 currently modifies the parsing rules of IRI instead, which I 
think is the wrong approach.

The other issue that got a lot of discussion is whether the things used 
in HTML should be called "URL", when in reality they are something else.

BR, Julian