Subject: Re: [whatwg] New URL Standard from Anne van Kesteren on 2012-09-24 ([email-masked] from September 2012)

From: Julian Reschke <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 24 Sep 2012 14:03:38 +0200

FYI:

Quoting AvK in
<http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/public-whatwg-archive/2012Sep/0297.html>:

> The plan is to obsolete the RFCs. But yes, I will add some references
> in the Goals section most likely. Similar to what has been done in the
> DOM Standard.

Note this is about RFC 3986, which is a Full Standard.

Best regards, Julian

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From: Peter Saint-Andre <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 24 Sep 2012 12:41:40 -0600

On 9/24/12 6:03 AM, Julian Reschke wrote:
>> The plan is to obsolete the RFCs. But yes, I will add some
>> references in the Goals section most likely. Similar to what has
>> been done in the DOM Standard.
> 

Hi Julian,

It's not completely clear to me what Anne meant there by saying "the
plan is to obsolete the RFCs" (naturally that is not something that
anyone outside the IETF can do, although they can ignore the RFCs).
It's also not clear to me what the WHATWG HTML Living Standard [1]
really means by "willful violation" [2] -- e.g., is it just an
allowance for APIs and browser software to not be completely strict
about processing some input for the sake of backward compatibility
with existing (messy) web content, or is it an active attempt at
redefining core protocols? However, it is interesting that the willful
violations are not limited to RFC 3986: the spec also mentions willful
violations of RFC 2046, RFC 2616, RFC 2781, RFC 5322, EcmaScript,
XPath, XSLT, and Unicode. Quite a list...

Peter

[1] http://www.whatwg.org/specs/web-apps/current-work/

[2]
http://www.whatwg.org/specs/web-apps/current-work/multipage/introduction.html#willful-violation

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From: SM <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 24 Sep 2012 14:31:27 -0700

>really means by "willful violation" [2] -- e.g., is it just an

The following message was posted over a year ago: 
http://www.ietf.org/mail-archive/web/apps-discuss/current/msg03064.html

Regards,
-sm

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From: Brian E Carpenter <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 24 Sep 2012 22:51:41 +0100

Mark Nottingham still being the IETF's liaison manager for the W3C liaison,
I assume we will be hearing from him what all this means and how it's
being coordinated.

Some of the "violations" are "motivated by a desire to handle legacy
content". That seems to be in the IETF spirit of "Be strict when sending and
tolerant when receiving" for the sake of backwards compatibility. Any of them
that damage interoperability and compatibility would be more worrisome.

Regards
   Brian

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From: John C Klensin <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 24 Sep 2012 22:54:48 -0400

--On Monday, September 24, 2012 22:51 +0100 Brian E Carpenter
<[email-masked]> wrote:

>...
> Some of the "violations" are "motivated by a desire to handle
> legacy content". That seems to be in the IETF spirit of "Be
> strict when sending and tolerant when receiving" for the sake
> of backwards compatibility. Any of them that damage
> interoperability and compatibility would be more worrisome.

And some of it isn't.  As just one example, opinions may differ
about whether it is reasonable to impose restrictions on valid
email addresses because some legacy implementations did a sloppy
job, but one certainly cannot justify it on the basis of the
Robustness Principle.

    john