Re: [whatwg/url] Is the first example (an octet 0x7F is percent encoded as "%23") correct? (#545)

Octet/Byte

The URL Standard states in section 4.3

A byte is a sequence of eight bits...

So it redefines the meaning of 'byte' to be an octet. Other standards are more aware of (and picky about) the difference.  For example, the RFC list of the IETF avoids 'byte', and the MIME type application/octet-stream (RFC-1341) is deliberately not a byte-stream.

My remark is not about confusion, but about consistent wording across standards. As a minimum concession one could rephrase the above definition to something like

A byte in this standard is always synonym to an octet, a sequence of eight bits,...

I am not going to pursue this issue beyond this post. I just noted the slightly inexact usage of 'byte' in this standard, because I am used to extremely precise wording in documents of this kind.

Wolf Lammen

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