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

@alwinb 

Please don't question the motivations of anybody contributing to this standard. This kind of hostile language ("the Whatwg is increasingly crippling itself by a distaste for anything and anyone that reminds them of the more formal or theoretic") really isn't appropriate.

I mentioned previously that the IETF email thread was shockingly hostile, and it put me off wanting anything to do with that process. Please don't bring the same attitude here.

@alercah 

> The WhatWG approach appears to be to attempt to document the behaviour of one browser, write tests, then attempt to converge browsers to the resulting specification. Although the goal is to eventually have a standard that browsers are expected to follow, the quoted paragraph tells me that this document is not yet a standard even in the browser world. It is merely documentation.
>
> Or to put it more plainly, in the 30% of test cases where Chrome disagrees with Safari, there is no way to tell who is right and who is wrong. Should Chrome change to match Safari or vice versa? 
>
> But from the sounds of it, in many cases, that reasoning is merely "because Safari does this" which is exactly the opposite of good design practice.

To be clear: I don't speak for the WHATWG or the editors.

But I would like to refute the suggestion that this standard just documents WebKit's behaviour; WebKit rewrote its URL implementation to match the standard.

When differences are found between the browsers, generally the editors ask for a survey of what the current behaviours are, and the browser reps agree on which behaviour should be converged upon. Some parts have converged on WebKit's prior behaviour, some parts have converged on Firefox, some on Chrome, etc - it's all openly available, you can check the discussions by checking the relevant PRs. So while each piece has its own precedent, there wasn't one browser that implemented all of the various pieces in one place (until recently).

Even for the parts that Chrome/Firefox haven't implemented yet, in principle they've agreed with that text being part of the standard. That being said, it's a living standard, and perhaps they (or others) will encounter compatibility issues which WebKit users didn't experience - that's why I say we need broader adoption in order to truly claim that this is how URLs work on the web platform, and that writing it in stone this early is likely to be unwise.

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