Re: [whatwg/url] It's not immediately clear that "URL syntax" and "URL parser" conflict (#118)

@domenic
That would mean web browsers are not allowed not to accept something that is pointless and has been considered invalid since URIs were a thing, only to accept it but give a console log message. Which again considers only web browsers. Other applications that use URLs probably don't have a console for logging such messages.

@jyasskin
If the goal is interoperability, standardizing the behavior of the major (read: popular) implementations—which for WHATWG usually means "let's standardize whatever Google Chrome does, other browsers don't matter as much and anything that isn't a web browser or isn't the HTTP protocol doesn't matter at all"—isn't the best option since these implementations are usually the most actively developed and the ones that care most about those standards. If the standards make another decision than what these implementations do, it's more likely that they would change their behavior than it is that the other implementations would. Of course, this sounds like a bad argument, but that's only because it relies on a wrong premise, which is that defining things based on the major implementations is a good idea.

This isn't surprising given that many people interested in WHATWG use Chrome, have Gmail email addresses, or are Google employees. The others are with Mozilla, use Firefox, and probably use Gmail email addresses.

This approach of standards as a popularity contest is harming the web, it tries to make tools like curl that already do URL parsing correctly and very well behave like the popular web browsers for "interoperability". And the popular web browsers behave like they do only in order to support every unreasonable thing that can be found on web pages, because their market share depends on supporting as many web pages as possible so that users don't switch to another browser. And then other browsers, and tools like curl, are expected to do the same because a spec says to!

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