Hello Peter, others,
On 2011/11/04 13:21, Peter Saint-Andre wrote:
After chatting during TPAC 2011 with Addison, Larry, Richard, Ian, Mike,
Ted, Julian (etc.), I'd like to share some thoughts about a possible
compromise / resolution regarding Issue 56 in the HTML WG:
http://www.w3.org/html/wg/tracker/issues/56
Some observations and opinions:
1. It is unlikely that existing browsers will change their current URL
parsing behavior. (I am not judging whether that behavior is good or bad.)
I agree that it's very unlikely that they change it in areas where they
all agree on a particular behavior. Discussions in the IRI WG have often
very quickly come up with examples where major browsers differ, and (at
least) in these areas, some change seems desirable.
2. Documentation of that behavior is out of scope for the revisions to
RFC 3987, and outside the charter of the IRI WG, because it's a matter
of URI [pre-]processing (RFC 3986) and not IRI processing (RFC 3987).
I have to say that I'm very surprised to see such an "out of scope"
statement. Of course, I haven't been part to the discussions you
mention, and I admit that coming from you as the responsible Area
Director, such a statement carries a lot of weight.
However, as far as I can remember, the issue of how browsers deal with
IRIs was always an important part in the deliberations that lead up to
the formation of the WG, and also during the WG.
Also, saying that browsers do URI (pre-)processing but not IRI
(pre-)processing surprises me quite a lot, because the single most
important difference between URIs and IRIs is that the later allow
non-ASCII characters, and browsers definitely do that. This is despite
the fact that the HTML5 spec likes to call these "URL"s (which is
neither URI nor IRI).
3. It is unlikely that RFC 3986 will ever be modified to recommend the
current behavior, and simply impossible before HTML5 is advanced at the
W3C (even if such modifications were desirable).
Fully agreed.
4. As far as I can see, the current behavior is in fact out of scope for
RFC 3986 and any future possible revisions to RFC 3986 because:
(a) it is mostly or completely a matter of pre-processing of strings
that look like URIs/URLs/"web-addresses" -- we could call these
"candidate strings" or "proto-URLs" or somesuch to disambiguate them
from URIs
(b) this pre-processing behavior is applied only in the web context
by browsers and software applications that want to be consistent
with browsers
(c) because of (b), there is no great danger that this behavior will
"leak" into processing of URIs in general (mailto:, sip:, tel:,
URNs, and so on)
Mostly agree, except for (c). URI/IRI/URL processing isn't a matter of
schemes; browsers handle mailto: schemes, and some deal with tel:
schemes and others.
5. There's no necessity for work on documentation of the current URL
parsing behavior to happen at the IETF, given that it's out of scope for
the IRI WG.
As said above, I disagree with the later part of the sentence, and
therefore have to disagree with the overall conclusion.
It may very well be that for various and potentially even very good
reasons, it is better to do this work somewhere else than at the IETF,
but "it's out of scope for the IRI WG" doesn't really make a good
reason, because the IRI WG was formed and until now has worked under the
assumption that it's in scope.
[That the IRI WG hasn't made much progress on this issue may be a good
reason to decide it shouldn't be part of the IRI WGs work, and should be
done somewhere else, but that would be a different reason.]
Regards, Martin.
Although this work could be done as an individual (non-WG)
I-D at the IETF, I think it could more easily be done at the W3C, either
as part of the HTML specification or as a separate document (the latter
might be preferable so that it can be reviewed in a more focused manner
and referenced more easily by other W3C specifications, but naturally I
would leave such decisions up to folks at the W3C). [The IRI WG is still
responsible for rfc3987bis, but that's off-topic for this email message.]
If folks can agree on the foregoing points, then I think it would be
productive to work on proposed revisions to the current text (or at
least what I believe is the current text):
http://www.w3.org/TR/html5/Overview.html#parsing-urls
I would be happy to make concrete suggestions during that revision
process if someone from the W3C could point to the preferred venue or
process (e.g., wiki page or bugzilla comments).
I look forward to discussing this further tomorrow morning during the
HTML WG session:
http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/public-html/2011Nov/0013.html
Peter
--
Peter Saint-Andre
https://stpeter.im/
