Re: Registering the about: URI scheme

Joseph A Holsten wrote:
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> I've posted the merged version of Lachlan and my drafts here:
>     http://josephholsten.com/about-uri-scheme/draft-holsten-about-uri-scheme.txt 
> 
> with inline comments and editing marks in html here:
>     http://josephholsten.com/about-uri-scheme/draft-holsten-about-uri-scheme.html 
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> and source control here:
>     http://github.com/josephholsten/about-uri-scheme/
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> My changes mostly amount to adding the required IANA and Security 
> Considerations sections.
> 
> As to whether different browsers use the exact same representation of 
> the about:blank resource, I think that is content type specific 
> decision, and belongs in the HTML5 spec. I'd care more that the DOM is 
> identical than the actual document.

The text

"If the application may use a document of MIME type 'text/html' and 
character encoding 'UTF-8', about:blank SHOULD be represented with an 
empty document.  Other representations are not defined."

is confusing. Specifically the use of "may" in the first sentence seems 
wrong (in the English grammar sense). It seems like the actual 
requirement is that HTML 5 UAs must represent about:blank as an empty 
(or close-to-empty) document (this seems like it is a must since it is 
required for web-compat.). Note that there seem to be a bunch of magic 
things about scripting about:blank documents (I'm not sure of the 
details); I don't know if the plan is to spec these here or defer to 
HTML 5 (the latter seems more sensible to me). If it is indeed the 
latter, I guess a reference to HTML 5 is needed here.

I guess it also makes sense (and is the secondary requirement that you 
are trying to express) for things that are not HTML 5 UAs but can do 
something with text/html documents to see about:blank as an empty 
document. This indeed seems like a should-level condition.

Received on Tuesday, 27 January 2009 13:04:45 UTC