Re: [whatwg/url] It's not immediately clear that "URL syntax" and "URL parser" conflict (#118)

The strategy of gathering various browser implementations into a descriptive standard, and then [keeping on refining the standard](https://github.com/whatwg/url/issues/118#issuecomment-218546850) until it hits the actual end goal seems very nebulous. What is the end goal?

Why bother doing things this way, as opposed to the normal practice of defining the actual standard we want, and then documenting variances (e.g. [spec](https://www.w3.org/TR/html5/) and [variance](http://caniuse.com/))? Why define anything other than the intended result? Browsers are very capable of setting their own timelines for spec conformance; why does a separate body need to create a timeline for everyone to follow? Browser vendors having massive funding (relatively speaking) and can constantly keep up with spec changes, but it seems crazy to offer lots of little spec changes over time to gradually shepherd software that uses URLs. This is an obvious recipe for disaster, as it could lead to a situation where there are many URL parsing schemes, each with their own little differences, and we have to do content negotiation to figure out which parser to use! Presumably that negotiation would also need a spec :)

I hope that's at least slightly convincing regarding why planning to change the spec over time is a bad idea. 

Here's an alternative, that perhaps describes this standard better: _why not convert it into a standard for parsing malformed URLs?_ This has the advantage of not superceding useful, prescriptive standards for URLs (so people won't think that writing software that generates a URL that starts with `http:////////////` is ever a good idea, which this standard is in massive danger of enabling) and also keeps whatever benefits people are claiming would arise from standardising permissive URL parsing.

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Received on Friday, 27 May 2016 15:35:26 UTC