Re: First Draft of W3C version of URL Spec

On Fri, 2014-08-29 at 00:34 +0000, Ian Hickson wrote:
> Until the WHATWG published this spec, the W3C never showed any interest in 
> republishing the URI specs (quite the opposite -- we shopped this around 
> to find another organisation to do the work for years and neither the W3C 
> nor the IETF showed any interest). But as soon as the WHATWG published 
> them, suddenly the W3C is all about publishing it.

I don't think that's an accurate representation.

Adam Barth started to work on a proposal for the API back in August
2010, and pointed the whatwg folks to it then and a month later, he
pointed the WebApps group to it as well.

In June 2011, the interest to work on a specification surfaced again in
the webapps group. You expressed interest in it as well [1], which isn't
a surprise the HTML5 specification contained text related to URLs. Art
Barstow, wearing his Chair hat on, supported the effort right away.
Adam, Mike, and Anne worked on a spec starting in September of the same
year and W3C published the first draft of it in May 2012. I may be
wrong, but it seems that Anne only started to publish on the whatwg side
in September 2012, probably due to difference of opinions regarding the
document license.

So work on URL happened on both sides between 2010 and 2011 before the
first draft of the specification got published in 2012.

On the IETF side, they created a group to work on IRI in 2010 as well
and gave up on it in 2013. The scope was narrower than the URL spec but
the interest was there. The W3C I18N WG always expressed interest in
helping to resolve the issues around IRI as well.

Philippe

[1]
http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/public-webapps/2011AprJun/0819.html
[2]
http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/public-whatwg-archive/2012Sep/0276.html

Received on Friday, 29 August 2014 16:35:02 UTC