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

@annevk

Browsers aren't extremely hard to change, they just really don't want to lose their market share, and see no problem with sacrificing the open web if that means they get more users and thus more influence. That's also why they shouldn't get to dictate standards.

The WHATWG's standards are about major browser vendors and web application developers. They are never about users, and are rarely about web page authors.

The W3C wanted to move the web forward with XHTML, SVG, XForms and other well thought technologies. Google wanted to make web applications to have [as much control as possible over users' computing](https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/who-does-that-server-really-serve.html). Browsers wanted market share.

The semantic web project failed because it didn't have the most influence, even if it was the better idea. Now we have HTML5: a [hundred JavaScript APIs for everything](https://platform.html5.org), very slow web browsers, [DRM as a web standard](https://www.defectivebydesign.org/no-drm-in-html5), specifications that tell browsers (how) they must support broken web pages; and the web is more of a mess than ever. All these [JavaScript APIs](https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/javascript-trap.en.html) result in a neverending stream of vulnerabilities, but it is the users who care about that, not the web developers or the browser vendors.

The web application developers are happy: they have enough JavaScript APIs to make their web applications that give them control over users' computing and access to all of their data. The major browser vendors are very happy: they get to keep their market share while still being able to say they follow standards, and the web is complicated enough now that it is impossible for any new browser to come in and compete with them.

But this does not make the web win. It just makes the people who have the most influence win. This is one among an infinity of good reasons why standards should never be defined by implementations.

You ask for a concrete reason why it's bad and why browsers should change, but there is no reason that the browsers will accept, because being stricter will always mean more pages possibly being broken, and therefore users possibly moving to another browser. The question that should really be asked is "Why did browsers change to allow all these invalid URIs in the first place?" The concrete reason they had to do that is their market share.

[Extensible Resource Identifiers](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Extensible_Resource_Identifier) are the best example of a standard, related to URIs, that actually improves the web, in this case by adding [many useful features](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Extensible_Resource_Identifier#Features) to them. What does the WHATWG's current URL spec actually bring that would make it worthy of replacing RFC 3896? Making dubious terminology changes about favoring "URL" even though "URI" has been used consistently [for 15 years](https://www.w3.org/TR/uri-clarification/) by the W3C and the IETF, and is the more logical term. Supposedly making "solid" something that has already been very clearly defined for a long time and that browsers have just decided not to follow. The problem is the behavior of the browsers, not the RFCs.

---
You are receiving this because you are subscribed to this thread.
Reply to this email directly or view it on GitHub:
https://github.com/whatwg/url/issues/118#issuecomment-219235157