Re: [whatwg/url] Support relative URLs (#531)

About justifying the work, @annevk 

To be fair, there is a lot of work that you do not have to justify anymore because I have already done it. The core problem: specifying a resolution algorithm that agrees with the current WHATWG standard – **is a solved problem**. 

Let me stress that. **The major technical issues have been solved**.

What remains to be done is to ask for input from the wider community to come up with a couple of APIs around that and converge on a well liked one. This could be the most enjoyable part. 

The problem with [referring to the working mode][2] to justify **not** making the additional effort is that the working mode conflicts with the explicitly stated goal to:

> Align RFC 3986 and RFC 3987 with contemporary implementations and obsolete them in the process.

A large part of RFC3986 is dedicated to relative references. You cannot achieve the above goal without putting in an effort to also specify relative references in the WHATWG standard. 

You can choose to drop that goal. But that puts the community in a  difficult spot. There is a demand for working with relative references in a way that is compatible with webbrowsers as is illustrated by e.g.  this [nodejs issue][3]. Again, the current WHATWG URL API cannot be used for that.  But  what is worse is that there also is no way to recreate the tools yourself by looking at the standard! So you leave the community with a new impactful standard, but you take away the tools _and_ do not provide the information to recover them. 

Many of the issues that keep popping up on the issue board here are the result of that situation. So I say that addressing this issue, which has been _almost completely solved_ anyway, will save you a lot of work in the future. 

[1]: https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/API/WindowOrWorkerGlobalScope/fetch#examples

[2]: https://github.com/whatwg/url/issues/531#issuecomment-714305738

[3]: https://github.com/nodejs/node/issues/12682




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Received on Monday, 10 May 2021 21:41:51 UTC