- From: Adam Barth <ietf@adambarth.com>
- Date: Tue, 19 Apr 2011 23:22:50 -0700
- To: Julian Reschke <julian.reschke@gmx.de>
- Cc: Maciej Stachowiak <mjs@apple.com>, public-iri@w3.org
On Tue, Apr 19, 2011 at 11:17 PM, Julian Reschke <julian.reschke@gmx.de> wrote: >> The only two blackbox-observable URL operations in browsers are: >> >> (1) Parsing into components as exposed by the<a> element and the Location >> object, among other things. >> (2) Resolving a possibly-relative reference, relative to a base URL. >> >> It's theoretically possible that (2) can be described partly using a >> component splitting algorithm that is inconsistent with (1). I don't believe >> this is known to be the case for any existing browser. >> >> In any case, a comprehensive test suite examining behaviors (1) and (2) >> will tell us all there is to know about URL processing by browsers and >> similar UAs. We can infer a model from the data once we have the data. > > Do you have some idea about how relevant the behavior of (1) is in practice? > I think from the test results we can conclude that at least some aspects of > it (port defaulting) do not interoperate well at all, and that this doesn't > seem to be a big problem in practice... It's a moderate problem in practice. For example, every browser I'm aware of has had (historically) security bugs arising from subtly different URL processing by various components. We also have examples of compatibility problems with web sites arising from different URL processing by browsers. Adam
Received on Wednesday, 20 April 2011 06:23:48 UTC