RE: Draft [URL] reference update to informative text

>> That said - man, it sure would help me feel better about the stability and applicability if the WHATWG had any kind of addressing of the places where this spec (and others) fail those NRP principles - say, a stability section, or a clear "this is how this is likely to change in the future".  Or a stable snapshot that doesn't have an derogatory lawyercat title, but does have a clear "you probably want the living standard over here" pointer.  Because right now, the answer in every case has been "everything can change at any time", which is a concerning failure.
>
> Well, the answer is certainly more nuanced than that. (We also discussed this during the TAG F2F, so I feel it important to relay here, to the extent the minutes may not cover it.) It's "anything could change *as long as it doesn't break the web*." That guarantee is actually a very strong one, and also probably the strongest you'd want to make---anything stronger would unnecessarily constrain evolution and bugfixes.

It certainly is more nuanced than that, but I don't think your 
characterization captures the important issue.

I've made an effort to compare the results as specified by the living 
standard against the IETF RFCs against current browser behavior[1][2]. 
The obvious disclaimers are that the my scripts may have bugs, the 
expected test results may have bugs and/or may not be up to date, there 
are other user agents than browser; but even with these caveats, I 
believe that the overall picture to be correct, useful, and sobering.

To help, the overall index page is color-coded, with four colors:

   Pale Red   - #FF8888 - convergence hasn't been achieved
   Hot Pink   - #FF69B4 - convergence exists, but doesn't match WHATWG
   Gold       - #FFD700 - converging results match WHATWG but not RFCs
   Pale Green - #BBFFBB - convergence matches both WHATWG and RFCs

Based on these results, I believe that it is very premature to tell 
implementors that the spec is ready to be implemented, as they may very 
well find themselves implementing something that has not yet had wide 
review, and may very well change.

What I do believe would be helpful is for either the Living Standard or 
a stable branch taken thereof to be updated to only normatively state 
what is stable there is broad consensus that it is unlikely to change, 
to mark the other areas with some form of "there be dragons here", for 
example by stating that file: URIs are implementation defined, and to 
post that as a dated reference.  Revisit periodically, and hopefully the 
once thought to be stable stuff wouldn't have changed much, and that 
there are more areas that are now stable and can be normatively described.

- Sam Ruby

[1] http://intertwingly.net/blog/2014/10/02/WHATWG-URL-vs-IETF-URI
[2] http://intertwingly.net/stories/2014/10/05/urltest-results/

Received on Thursday, 9 October 2014 15:37:33 UTC