Re: heads-up about "new" URLs section in HTML5 editor's draft

On Sun, 29 Jun 2008, Roy T. Fielding wrote:
> 
> Please note that we spent 12 years reaching a global agreement on the 
> meaning of URI, URL, URN, Web addresses, or whatever else you might call 
> them, in order for all implementations to be interoperable and for all 
> protocols to obey the same restrictions on generation of those 
> identifiers.  The result is IETF STD 66, RFC 3986, and it defines the 
> most important standard of all the standards that make up what we call 
> the Web.

With all due respect, if the goal was for all implementations to be 
interoperable, then it failed.


> I suggest that the section be removed or replaced with the limited and 
> specific needs for parsing href and src attribute values such that the 
> attribute's value string is mapped to a URI-reference with a defined 
> base-URI.

How is that different from what the spec does now?


> In contrast, pretending to define a new URL standard as part of HTML5 is 
> not acceptable.

It certainly isn't the intent of the text in the HTML5 spec to define a 
new URL standard -- indeed, HTML5 goes out of its way right now not to 
define anything contradictory to the URI specs (a valid HTML5 URL is only 
valid if it would have been a valid URI or a valid IRI treated exactly as 
per IRI rules). It's only error handling rules that are defined, since the 
URI specs leave that undefined.


> That would be a fundamental violation of the Web architecture.

Could you elaborate on this? What do you mean?

Cheers,
-- 
Ian Hickson               U+1047E                )\._.,--....,'``.    fL
http://ln.hixie.ch/       U+263A                /,   _.. \   _\  ;`._ ,.
Things that are impossible just take longer.   `._.-(,_..'--(,_..'`-.;.'

Received on Monday, 30 June 2008 05:26:20 UTC