[Bug 12508] Unclear how to handle <link href> when the href value is only whitespace

http://www.w3.org/Bugs/Public/show_bug.cgi?id=12508

Aryeh Gregor <Simetrical+w3cbug@gmail.com> changed:

           What    |Removed                     |Added
----------------------------------------------------------------------------
             Status|NEW                         |RESOLVED
                 CC|                            |Simetrical+w3cbug@gmail.com
         Resolution|                            |WORKSFORME

--- Comment #2 from Aryeh Gregor <Simetrical+w3cbug@gmail.com> 2011-06-24 19:00:54 UTC ---
EDITOR'S RESPONSE: This is an Editor's Response to your comment. If you are
satisfied with this response, please change the state of this bug to CLOSED. If
you have additional information and would like the Editor to reconsider, please
reopen this bug. If you would like to escalate the issue to the full HTML
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Status: Rejected
Change Description: no spec change
Rationale: "must contain a valid non-empty URL potentially surrounded by
spaces" is an authoring requirement, not an implementation requirement.  It
only affects whether the page is valid, and has no bearing on how browsers
should process the page:

"""
Note: There is no implied relationship between document conformance
requirements and implementation conformance requirements. User agents are not
free to handle non-conformant documents as they please; the processing model
described in this specification applies to implementations regardless of the
conformity of the input documents.
"""
http://www.whatwg.org/specs/web-apps/current-work/multipage/infrastructure.html#conformance-classes

If you follow the "obtain the resource" algorithm exactly as specified, without
making any assumptions based on authoring conformance criteria or other
considerations, it's clear that you should only abort if the href is an empty
string.  Nothing says you should abort if the href consists of one or more
space characters.

Please reopen if you either think the spec should change to also include
whitespace-only href's, or if you think it should be further clarified somehow
to say that it really only means the empty string.  In general, it's hard to
clarify this sort of thing, where someone is reading between the lines of
algorithms instead of taking them completely literally.

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Received on Friday, 24 June 2011 19:00:56 UTC