Context:
http://krijnhoetmer.nl/irc-logs/whatwg/20141119#l-298
http://krijnhoetmer.nl/irc-logs/whatwg/20141119#l-469
First the bad news.
1) I don't like the state of the current URL specification. I find it
borders on unreadable. And that comes from somebody who has read it
multiple times and attempted to implement it faithfully before embarking
on a rewrite. It is buggy. It is incomplete. It has no rationale for
places where it diverges from existing browser behavior. I'm sorry if
that means that I'm calling your baby ugly, but that is the way I feel.
I am personally willing to rewrite the whole thing from scratch if
necessary and publish the result under a non-permissive license if that
is the only way to get an improved version published.
2) You are hard to work with. Today for example, you changed your
previous position that the prepending/reordering was intentional to one
of it doesn't reorder; and then to it does reorder, and that is a bug.
On the normative text concern you had, you declined multiple times to
explain your concern. It turns out that you hadn't done any sort of
analysis deeper than counting the number of musts and from that drew an
incorrect conclusion. When I pointed out that the text that I am
proposing to replace also doesn't have any musts, you finally agreed.
3) Many WHATWG specifications are jointly produced and separately
published by the W3C. I don't agree with the subset of the WHATWG that
believes in taking terms developed by others, developing new text and
making it available under a permissive license allowing copying, and
then objecting when people actually do copy.
Now the good news, in the same order.
1) I'd much rather work with you than against you. I have experience in
building communities, and I believe I am already showing results in this
space. You've remarked that it has attracted browser interest that
wasn't previously there. Let's build on that together.
2) I can be equally hard to work with. But in both cases, that a
feature as well as a bug. I will say that your tendency to be terse
doesn't do you any favors. I'll ask that you be open minded when I
request that you say something more. Feel free to ask me to change.
3) Our differences on licenses and exclusiveness doesn't mean that we
can't work together. I believe that I've demonstrated that I'm open to
putting everything I have produced and will produce on this topic into
the WHATWG specification. As long as you and the WHATWG are open to
that, I don't believe that the people who believe that there is a need
for a W3C specification have made their case. I'm willing to given them
a reasonable amount of time to do so, and if they don't, call them on that.
