Re: making interoperability decisions (was Re: parsing URI (references) according to RFC 3986)

Hello Chris, others,

On 2011/06/20 13:51, Adam Barth wrote:
> On Sun, Jun 19, 2011 at 9:35 PM, Chris Weber<chris@lookout.net>  wrote:

>> Regarding interoperability decisions - has consensus previously been made
>> among the WG members as to how a behavior-difference should be resolved?

Not that I know. I think we haven't actually had any specific decisions 
made, so we couldn't even point to examples. But it's good to see that 
you as a chair are asking these kinds of questions. I'd not want to have 
complicated rules, but having a discussion about the considerations 
involved is a good thing.

>> In
>> a case like treating a "\" as a "/", would the most reasonable decision be
>> based on how many of the 5 most popular Web browsers are doing it, or would
>> it be based on market share, or something else?
>>
>> For example, if only IE and Firefox treated "\" as "/", would that be reason
>> to write such behavior into the spec?  (considering those two together claim
>>> 50% total market share).  Or what if the case was Opera, Safari, and
>> Chrome - 3 out of the 5 but still<  50% combined market share.

I personally would agree that number of browsers (there are others than 
the five that are usually mentioned) and market share should be 
something to consider. But we shouldn't make decisions based on these 
numbers if it's a close call (e.g. 51% vs. 49%, or even a bit more slanted).

> There isn't really a general rule for how we make these sorts of
> decisions.

Agreed. As a WG, we can adopt rules, but then we can also break them.

> Usually there are a number of factors involved.  For
> example, having 4 of 5 browsers implementing one behavior can be a
> strong indication that we should change the spec and the 5th browser
> to converge with that behavior.  Another consideration might be
> whether one behavior is likely to be more compatible.

Compatible with what? We might want to look at compatibility with 
existing content (but then this is rather difficult, because it's 
usually not a question of 50% or more, but a question of 0.1% or 0.001%, 
and the data may vary very much depending on the sample).

Or compatibility with the current specs (which means compatibility with 
people who implemented from spec, which seems to be the case a lot in 
areas besides browsers). I'd personally hope that we can give this some 
non-negligible weight.


> In this case, it seems fairly clear that we should treat \ like / for
> at least some common schemes.  The real test, of course, is whether
> Firefox actually adopts that behavior.  To make progress on these
> sorts of issues, we need folks "in the room" who can commit to
> implementing whatever decision we reach.  In some sense, that's more
> important than the particular details of the decisions we make.

We seem to get closer to this, finally. Great!

Regards,   Martin.

Received on Monday, 20 June 2011 08:20:05 UTC