Perhaps the correct solution would be to offer only the non-raw
methods for WHATWG URL and to not attempt any additional
percent-decoding there? My reasoning is that the WHATWG URL is a
living standard anyways, so trying to add additional semantics on top
will result in sadness. My understanding is also that it is primarily
intended for interaction with web browsers or to embed these URLs into
HTML. For access control, e.g. in your framework the RFC3986 URI
should be used. It's what HTTP uses internally and it supports
well-defined normalization.
What do you think?
Hi Tim and Maté
As a primary user of RFC3986/87 and with my experiences with WHATWG URL
I fully support the removal of the `raw` methods on the WhatWgUrl
implementation. The specification defines in one go via a state machine
parsing, validation and normalization basically you always work with
normalized URLs. I believe Javascript developers and browser vendors
expect normalization out of the box for security and coherence between
browsers. So in the context of browsers raw values are never expected
nor wanted. I always wonder how you could extract raw value since the
specification always talk about codepoints and parse the URL while
normalizing the input.
As Tim also pointed out, the WHATWG is a living standard so the URL
produces today may not be the one produces tomorrow which would then add
more burden on the maintenance side if you constantly need to update how
raw values are being extract in a specification that does not even
consider them (does not offer an official way to access them).
Last but not least I tried several time to implement a polyfill for the
Whatwg Url and I fail for that specific reason. I always go back to my
initial comment both specs are great in that they complement each other.
They may overlaps but they are fundamently different, so their public
API should probably also reflect that. (ie WhatwgURL supports IDN host,
RFC3986 does not) encoding differs for query string and so on. Trying to
offer the same API for both even for `raw` method is IMHO not helping.
And probably it may ease even your implementation since you would not
have to worry about more edge cases.
Best regards,
Ignace Nyamagana Butera
