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

Understood and I realize it's not exactly pretty. The problem is that browsers are extremely hard to change. That one bug report cURL got is often enough for them to not be willing to touch code. Especially code that's been working okay for two decades and is deployed to hundreds of millions of users.

So if we want to change the slashes situation, that existed way before I wrote the URL Standard by the way, we will need a concrete reason why it's bad and why browsers should change. Might be best as a separate issue on this repository at this point. Then we file bugs against the various browsers saying that them not returning failure (as they all do for, .e.g, `http://test:test/`) is problematic and then hopefully they invest the engineering time in changing that. And it seems from @sleevi's response we might be able to get Chrome to run some experiments for us there.

It might help to understand that the WHATWG was created out of this browser inertia. The W3C wanted to forget about the mess that was HTML and browsers and move on to what they saw as greener pastures. The WHATWG was formed by individuals from browser vendors and web developers that recognized the inertia and were willing to figure it out, lay it bare, and then improve upon it. That is what I see us doing here too. It's not pretty, it's not fun, and the power balance is a little skewed towards the mega clients, but this is how we think we can improve the web and I think we've done a pretty good job of that thus far across various efforts.

Anyway, I am truly sorry for the tone. It's always a bit of a balancing act when there's a bunch of fresh ideas entering your community and I'm usually pretty bad at handling them. But we are definitely willing to work with you all and appreciate your input on what should be clarified and how. And what parts should maybe be changed since they are actively harmful to allow.

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Received on Friday, 13 May 2016 07:45:47 UTC