Re: testing URL decomposition (related to ISSUE-56)

Maciej Stachowiak wrote:
> Of the browsers I tried (Firefox, Opera, Safari, Chrome), Firefox had 
> the most green and I don't see any problem with changing Safari to match.

OK, should the spec also match Firefox then?

> There is one behavior checked by these tests that seem potentially 
> unwise: trying to differentiate between URLs that had particular 
> percent-escaping in the original source vs. equivalent ones that did 
> not. All browsers I tried seem to either consistently escape or 
> consistently unescape in any given component. Unless IE differentiates I 
> don't think we can conclude that this is required behavior.

Actually, IE *does* differentiate, so the pathname components returned for

   http://example.org/a-umlaut-ä

and

   http://example.org/a-umlaut-%C3%A4

are different.

Anyway, what this shows is that implementing the algorithm for the URL 
decomposition IDL attributes according to WEBADDRESSES is *not* required 
for compatibility with existing content -- maybe because it's simply not 
used a lot for broken URIs, or because the differences do not matter in 
practice, or because code has learned to work around them (such as by 
inserting "/" when pathname doesn't return a leading "/").

Now what will be much more interesting is to find out whether the rules 
in WEBADDRESSES are actually used for navigation, but that'll require 
different test cases.

Best regards, Julian

Received on Thursday, 11 February 2010 14:26:47 UTC