Re: Draft [URL] reference update to informative text

On Fri, Oct 10, 2014 at 1:30 PM, Anne van Kesteren <annevk@annevk.nl> wrote:
> On Fri, Oct 10, 2014 at 2:25 PM, David Sheets <sheets@alum.mit.edu> wrote:
>> In terms of the technical architecture of the Web, what widespread
>> effect do you foresee occurring from this normative expansion of the
>> space of URLs? Do you have plans to relate the New URL to the previous
>> standards?
>
> URLs are not new. URLs with spaces in them are not new either. Most
> software dealing with web content knows this. Standards might not, but
> then they are often behind on the facts.

Could you quantify the deviations from the previous standards? I'm
quite certain that a lot of software is also "behind on the facts".

>> If I have a distributed system which needs to process URLs, should I
>> upgrade all of it to match browsers because browsers tolerate behavior
>> observed in 0.00001% of content?
>
> Citation needed.

I could say the same for all of the undocumented deviations in the
prose state machine that defines the WHATWG URL Standard.

How is the namespace being expanded? Why? How often does each deviation occur?

>> What happens when someone reads about
>> New URLs and then tries to give my system a URL only recently
>> described by the specification?
>
> That depends on the definition of my system, as you well know.

Cool. So systems that implicitly rely on invariants in URLs should
just break? Without understanding exactly how the allowable
identifier-space has changed, I don't see how you can make any
informed statements about Not Breaking the Web.

Received on Friday, 10 October 2014 12:57:30 UTC