Re: Soliciting feedback on draft-abarth-url

On Apr 19, 2011, at 10:39 PM, Julian Reschke wrote:

> On 19.04.2011 19:37, Adam Barth wrote:
>> ...
>> I should have mentioned that the PASS/FAIL judgements of these tests
>> are set somewhat arbitrarily.  The test exist to probe behavior.  It's
>> our job to look at the behavior and reach judgements about them.
>> ...
> 
> We just should be aware that we use probes that are actually relevant. Meaning: that what we can observe from the DOM behavior is the *actual* behavior when parsing/resolving URIs. I believe you that this is the case for Webkit, but I'm not totally convinced it's the case for all UAs.

The only two blackbox-observable URL operations in browsers are:

(1) Parsing into components as exposed by the <a> element and the Location object, among other things.
(2) Resolving a possibly-relative reference, relative to a base URL.

It's theoretically possible that (2) can be described partly using a component splitting algorithm that is inconsistent with (1). I don't believe this is known to be the case for any existing browser.

In any case, a comprehensive test suite examining behaviors (1) and (2) will tell us all there is to know about URL processing by browsers and similar UAs. We can infer a model from the data once we have the data.

Regards,
Maciej

Received on Wednesday, 20 April 2011 05:57:06 UTC