Re: [whatwg/url] Provide a succinct grammar for valid URL strings (#479)

I'm well aware that the test suite is not normative, and that the writing spec is normative, and of the use of "normative" as a term of art. But you said:

> Yes — and in other cases in WHATWG specs where there’s been discussion about formalisms for similar cases (e.g., some things in the HTML spec), that rationale (people will end up treating the extra formalism as normative) has been a strong argument against including such formalisms in the specs.

You claimed that people treating the extra formalism as normative is an argument against the inclusion, not that it would create two potentially-contradictory normative texts.

By the same argument, you should remove the URL writing spec, because it risks being treated as normative, and consider retiring the test suite as well because people treat it as normative because the spec itself is incomprehensible. 

I don't think that you should remove either of them. I think you should make the spec comprehensible so that people stop being tempted to treat something else as normative.

> The section on writing URLs doesn’t claim it matches the parser.

I agree that it does not claim to produce invalid URLs. It does, however, make a claim that the operation of serialization is reversible by the parser:

> The URL serializer takes a URL and returns an ASCII string. (If that string is then parsed, the result will equal the URL that was serialized.)

Admittedly, this claim is rather suspect because it then provides many examples of where that is not true. I suspect it is missing some qualifiers, such as that the serialization must succeed and the parsing must be done with no base URL and no encoding override.

Even with those qualifiers added, I challenge you to produce a formal proof that serialization and parsing produces an equal URL.

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