Re: Shrinking HTML5 some more — Anne’s Weblog

Maciej Stachowiak wrote:
> 
> On Mar 30, 2009, at 5:30 AM, Sam Ruby wrote:
> 
>> Is someone willing to volunteer to work with and M. Duerst and M. 
>> Suignard to see to it that the revision is something that is usable by 
>> the HTML 5 Working Draft?
>>
>> Alternatives: DanC continues to pursue a separate draft, or Ian 
>> continues include this section in HTML 5.
> 
> Pardon if this is stating the obvious, but to make an informed decision 
> we need to know the following:
> 
> 1) What specifically are the processing differences between LEIRIs and 
> Web Addresses (or HTML5 pre-processed URIs if you prefer)? It seems like 
> some of these are know, but not all.
> 
> 2) Are the current IRI/LEIRI editors amenable to making changes for 
> real-world compatibility?
> 
>  From my point of view, it is essential to have a specification that 
> correctly describes what user agents must do to process URLs in public 
> Web content. It would be even better if that were the primary officially 
> IETF spec for *R*s, but having at least one correct specification is 
> more important than consolidation. So we should figure out if a unified 
> spec would be able to match real-world constraints before we sign on for 
> it.
> 
> Having worked on Safari since its inception, I very clearly recall the 
> amount of crazy reverse engineering we had to do to figure out URL 
> processing, after initially naively assuming that the URI RFC specified 
> what we had to do. It took multiple releases to get closer to the actual 
> de facto standard, and I'm not even 100% sure we are there today. This 
> is definitely a significant barrier to entry for any tool that wants to 
> process Web content and we should definitely work to get it fixed.

DanC is "sort of volunteering"[1].  His approach of collecting test 
cases in order to have a more productive discussion along the lines of 
the questions you are asking seems eminently sane to me.  If you would 
happen to have any, I'm sure he would appreciate it.

> Regards,
> Maciej

[1] http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/public-html/2009Mar/0709.html

Received on Monday, 30 March 2009 20:43:11 UTC