Minuted here:
http://www.w3.org/2014/10/28-webapps-minutes.html#item07
Note that this is a lengthy and comprehensive email covering a number of
topics. I encourage replies to have new subject lines and to limit
themselves to only one part and to aggressively excerpt out the parts of
this email that are not relevant to the reply.
---
Short term, there should be a heart-beat of the W3C URL document
published ASAP. The substantive content should be identical to the
current WHATWG URL Standard. The spec should say this, likely do so
with a huge red tab at the bottom like the one that can be found in the
following document:
http://www.w3.org/TR/2014/WD-encoding-20140603/
The Status section should also reference the current Formal Objections
so that any readers of this document may be aware that the final
disposition of this draft may be in the form of a tombstone note. The
current Formal Objections I am aware of are listed here:
https://www.w3.org/wiki/HTML/wg/UrlStatus#Formal_Objections
Finally, I would encourage the status section to mention bug
https://www.w3.org/Bugs/Public/show_bug.cgi?id=25946 so that readers may
be aware that the URL parsing section may be rewritten. This indirectly
references the work I am about to describe, and it does so in a
non-exclusive manner meaning that others are welcome to propose
alternate resolutions.
I am willing to help with this effort.
---
Separately, at this time I would like to solicit feedback on some work I
have been doing which includes a JavaScript reference implementation, a
concrete albeit incomplete proposal for resolution to bug 25946, and
some comparative test results with a number of browser and non-browser
implementations. For the impatient, here are some links:
http://intertwingly.net/projects/pegurl/liveview.html
http://intertwingly.net/projects/pegurl/url.html
http://intertwingly.net/projects/pegurl/urltest-results/
For those that want to roll up their proverbial sleeves and dive in,
check out the code here:
https://github.com/rubys/url
You will find a list of prerequisites that you need to install first at
the top of the Makefile. Possible ways to contribute (in order of
preference): pull requests, github issues, and emails to this
(public-webapps@w3.org) mailing list. I've already gotten and closed
one, you can be next :-).
https://github.com/rubys/url/pulls?q=is%3Apr
My plans include addressing the Todos listed in the document, and begin
work on the merge. That work is complicated by a need to migrate the
URL Standard from anolis to bikeshed. You can see progress on that
effort in a separate branch, as well as the discussion that has happened
to date:
https://github.com/rubys/url/tree/anolis2bikeshed
https://github.com/rubys/url/commit/e617fd66135bd75b1052700081de5319914168a5#commitcomment-8259740
To be clear, my proposed resolution for bug 25946 requires this
conversion, but this conversion doesn't require my proposed resolution
to bug 25946. I mention this as Anne seems to want this document to be
converted, and that effort can be pulled separately.
---
Now to get to what I personally am most interested in: identifying
changes to the expected test results, and therefore to the URL
specification -- independent of the approach that specification takes to
describing parsing. To kick off the discussion, here are three examples:
1) http://intertwingly.net/projects/pegurl/urltest-results/7357a04b5b
A number of browsers, namely Internet Explorer, Opera(Presto), and
Safari seem to be of the opinion that exposing passwords is a bad idea.
I suggest that this is a defensible position, and that the
specification should either standardize on this approach or at a minimum
permit this.
2) http://intertwingly.net/projects/pegurl/urltest-results/4b60e32190
This is not a valid URL syntax, nor does any browser vendor implement
it. I think it is fairly safe to say that given this state that there
isn't a wide corpus of existing web content that depends on it. I'd
suggest that the specification be modified to adopt the behavior that
Chrome, Internet Explorer, and Opera(Presto) implement.
3) http://intertwingly.net/projects/pegurl/urltest-results/61a4a14209
This is an example of a problem that Anne is currently wrestling with.
Note in particular the result produced by Chrome, which identifies the
host as a IPV4 address and canonicalizes it.
These are a few that caught my eye. Feel free to comment on these, or
any others, or even to propose new tests.
- Sam Ruby
