On Oct 24, 2012, at 3:39 AM, Brian E Carpenter wrote: > On 23/10/2012 00:32, Mark Nottingham wrote: > ... >> The underlying point that people seem to be making is that there's legitimate need for URIs to be a separate concept from "strings that will become URIs." By collapsing them into one thing, you're doing those folks a disservice. Browser implementers may not care, but it's pretty obvious that lots of other people do. > > Thanks for bringing this point out. It was explained to me in 1993 by TBL and > Robert Cailliau that URLs (the only term used then, I think) As a historical footnote, the term URL was created by the same BOF that created the Uniform Resource Identifiers working group at the IETF meeting in July 1992. The early Web protocol specs had used the term "network address". The term "Document Identifiers" came from Brewster Kahle and was later used in a call for proposals by the Coalition for Networked Information's Architectures & Standards Working Group, which in turn led to TimBL propose Web addresses as Universal Document Identifiers for a BOF at IETF 24 (Cambridge, MA). Somewhere in that BOF discussion, the URI working group was proposed and TimBL's proposal was renamed Uniform Resource Locators to distinguish it from other ideas for URNs [see IETF 24 proceedings, p.184, and the following link]. ftp://ftp.ietf.org/ietf/92jul/udi-minutes-92jul.txt TimBL had originally specified that addresses in HREF could be provided in full or partial form. The IETF removed the partial form, leading to all sorts of bad decisions regarding syntax, and so I revived it in 1994 as Relative URLs [RFC1808]. That spec is the only one that came close to defining what Anne is trying to do here -- a single parsing standard for potentially relative references. It is easy to claim that the merging of syntax specs that created RFC2396 lost some value when the parsing standard was replaced by a non-normative appendix. However, it was discussed extensively at the time, including with the browser developers, and there was simply nothing common enough to make standard. The best I could do for 2396 and 3986 was to include a regular expression that accepts all strings and parses them into the component parts. I have absolutely no problem with writing a proposed standard for parsing references, particularly if browser developers are willing to adhere to one. However, it is not a redefinition of URLs, nor does it make sense for error-correcting transformations (like pct-encoding embedded spaces) to be "the standard" for parsing when there are plenty of applications that string parse references for the sake of generating invalid test cases (e.g., the example attributed to curl). It is not non-interoperable behavior to parse input data differently depending on the context in which it is entered. What matters is that the context be properly documented to indicate what pre/post-processing is applied, just as we expect a browser's combined search/location dialog bars to be documented as not merely URL-entry forms (or be banned due to the privacy leakage of incremental search results). ....Roy