On Tue, Sep 13, 2016 at 5:07 PM, Jacob Champion <champio...@gmail.com> wrote:
> On 09/13/2016 12:25 PM, Jacob Champion wrote: > >> What is this? Is this the newest "there are a bunch of almost-right >> implementations so let's make yet another standard in the hopes that it >> won't make things worse"? Does anyone know the history behind this spec? >> > > (My goal in asking this question is not to stare and point and laugh, but > more to figure out whether we are skating to where the puck is going. It > would be nice for users to know which specification StrictURI is being > strict about.) RFC3986 as incorporated by and expanded upon by reference in RFC7230. IP, TCP, HTTP and it's data and framing are defined by the IETF. HTTP's definition depends on the meaning of many things, including ASCII, URI syntax, etc, see its table of citations. The things it depends on simply can't be moving targets any more than those definitions that the TCP protocol is dependant upon. The IETF process is to correct a broken underlying spec with a newly revised spec subject to peer review, and then update the consuming specs to leverage the changes in the underlying, where necessary (in some cases the revised underlying spec, once applied, has no impact on the consuming spec.) HTML folks use URL's, and therefore forked the spec they percieved as too rigid and inflexible. In fact, it wasn't, but it appears so if you read the spec as requiring -users- to -type- valid URI's, which was never the case. Although it gets prickly if you consider handling badly authored href= links in html. HTML became a "living spec" subject to perpetual evolution; this results in a state where all implementations are perpetually broken. But the key take-away is that whattfwg URI does not and cannot supercede RFC3986 for the purposes of RFC7230. Rather than improve the underlying spec, the group decided to overlay an unrelated spec. https://daniel.haxx.se/blog/2016/05/11/my-url-isnt-your-url/ does one decent job explaining some of this. Google "URI whatwg vs. ietf" for an excessively long list of references. So in short, whatwg spec describes URI's anywhere someone wants to apply their defintion; HTML5 is based upon this. The wire protocol of talking to an http: schema server is defined by RFC7230, which subordinates to the RFC3986 definition of a URI. How you choose to apply these two specs depends on your position in the stack.
