Change Proposal for ISSUE-189, was: ISSUE-189: uri-web-prefix - Chairs Solicit Proposals

On 2011-12-07 18:25, Paul Cotton wrote:
> 'Prefix convention needs to be coordinated with IETF'
> ...

Here's the Change Proposal:

SUMMARY

The specification overloads URI scheme names starting with "web+" with 
special semantics; however the names of URI schemes are controlled by 
IETF [1] and IANA, and thus coordination is needed.

In particular, in [2] the spec takes the position that registration of 
scheme name prefixes is possible. It is not, and thus the spec is in 
violation of the URI registration procedure. This disconnect should be 
resolved now; in particular as [1] is being revised right now anyway.

RATIONALE

Until the problem described above is resolved, the specification should 
not assign a special meaning to the prefix "web+". Thus, this 
extensibility point should be removed from the spec.

In particular:

(a) In "6.5.1.2 Custom scheme and content handlers", change

"A scheme, such as mailto or web+auth. The scheme must be compared in an 
ASCII case-insensitive manner by user agents for the purposes of 
comparing with the scheme part of URLs that they consider against the 
list of registered handlers."

to

"A scheme, such as mailto. The scheme must be compared in an ASCII 
case-insensitive manner by user agents for the purposes of comparing 
with the scheme part of URLs that they consider against the list of 
registered handlers."

Also change

"If the registerProtocolHandler() method is invoked with a scheme that 
is neither a whitelisted scheme nor a scheme whose value starts with the 
substring "web+" and otherwise contains only characters in the range 
U+0061 LATIN SMALL LETTER A to U+007A LATIN SMALL LETTER Z, the user 
agent must throw a SecurityError exception."

to

"If the registerProtocolHandler() method is invoked with a scheme that 
is not a whitelisted scheme, the user agent must throw a SecurityError 
exception."

(b) Drop "12.6 web+ scheme prefix".


IMPACT

1. Positive Effects

Coordination can happen with the standards body that controls URI scheme 
names.

2. Negative Effects

The protocol handler feature looses an extension point for now.

3. Conformance Classes Changes

Certain scheme names can not be used in registerProtocolHandler() anymore.

4. Risks

Early implementations might ignore the specification change. That 
doesn't seem to be any worse than HTML5 ignoring RFC 4395.


REFERENCES

[1] <http://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc4395>
[2] <http://dev.w3.org/html5/spec/Overview.html#web-scheme-prefix>

Received on Saturday, 14 January 2012 14:42:10 UTC