Re: resolving the URL mess

On 10/06/2014 11:54 PM, Austin William Wright wrote:
>
> On Mon, Oct 6, 2014 at 3:48 PM, Larry Masinter <masinter@adobe.com
> <mailto:masinter@adobe.com>> wrote:
>
>     And frankly I think we should include the political/organizational
>     power struggle which seems to fuel much of the angst that gets in
>     the way of a technical solution.
>
> Any power struggles I've seen so far first came about due to
> interoperability problems, by way of vendors choosing mutually
> incompatible workarounds.

+1

Anyone that solves the problem of interop will get people to rally 
behind them and the institutional problems will resolve themselves.

I look at this way: if I were creating a new programming language (like 
Elixir[1]) or runtime environment (like node.js[2]), I would undoubtedly 
have a URI or URL "parse" method included in that.  The question is: 
what should such a function do?

At the moment, I don't care whether it is called URL or URI.  I don't 
care whether the parts that are produced go by the HTML DOM names or the 
RFC names.  I don't care whether the results are captured in BNF, LEM, 
or a series of steps as the WHATWG oddly seems to prefer.  I don't even 
care -- yet -- whether or not the resulting algorithm can be layered on 
top of the existing RFCs, though I acknowledge that that is a a factor 
that will become important.

And that's why I have been focusing my efforts here:

   http://intertwingly.net/stories/2014/10/05/urltest-results/

Colors on the initial page triage results:

  * Pale red (#FF8888) no convergence or convergence doesn't match WHATWG
  * Gold (#FFD700) converging results don't match RFCs
  * Pale green (#BBFFBB) convergence matches both WHATWG and RFCs

Clicking through to an individual result, lack of convergence is 
represented by an entire column in gold.  Exceptions thrown are shown in 
pale violet.

People who want to capture test results for other environments can see 
the methodology, test data, and can ask questions here:

   http://intertwingly.net/blog/2014/10/02/WHATWG-URL-vs-IETF-URI

- Sam Ruby

[1] http://elixir-lang.org/docs/stable/elixir/URI.html
[2] http://nodejs.org/docs/latest/api/url.html

Received on Tuesday, 7 October 2014 11:42:19 UTC