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

@annevk
If convergence requires tweaks over time, why can't web browsers adjust over time their behavior to make it closer to the sane behavior defined by the RFCs?

Again, the answer is market share and power. That convergence on this requires tweaks over time is not true, it is very easy to just remove all the URL parsing code that handles incorrect URLs. Writing a proper URL parser that follows the RFCs is not difficult. But it is not what browsers want, because then some URLs might not work which might lead browsers to lose some of their precious market share. Instead, browsers want to work with as many URLs as possible, and specifications like this one are created not to make the web browsers work toward a sane end goal—which is never going to happen, everyone knows very well the spec is not going to become stricter with time—, but to make the other, already-correct implementations move toward some lax behavior. So that the browsers can get away with their implementation choices that actually harm the web. This is nothing new, the same thing happened with HTML5 versus XHTML.

The obstacle to convergence isn't that we don't have a spec (we already do have one: the RFCs), it's that the interests of browser vendors do not align with the correct behavior. So instead of converging toward the long-established correct behavior, the browser vendors try to create a new specification that establishes as a standard a new behavior, inferior from a technical point of view, but that does not conflict with their interest.

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