On 7/25/10 8:57 AM, Adam Barth wrote: >> There's also the related question of what browsers should do with input >> typed into the URL field. Other than establishing that these rules may be >> different between the URL field and URLs present in content, I'm not sure >> this is amenable to spec. But perhaps a survey of what browsers do would be >> useful. > > I wasn't planning to cover that because it's not a critical to > interoperability
Unfortunately, it is. In particular, servers need to know what to expect the browser to send if a user types non-ASCII into the url bar. There are real interoperability problems out there due to differing server and browser behavior in this regard. It may not be an _html_ interoperability problem, but it's certainly a _web_ interoperability problem. > There are also other > considerations there because the URLs are displayed to users as > security indicators. What's displayed is not a concern, in my opinion, in terms of interoperability. What's put on the wire is. The constraints that need to be imposed are much looser than on <a href> (e.g. we don't need to define exactly what url gets loaded if the user types "monkey" in the url bar), but sorting out the non-ASCII issue is definitely desirable. -Boris
