[whatwg] [wf2] type="url"

[Henri Sivonen]

On Feb 13, 2005, at 02:37, Anne van Kesteren wrote:

> Furthermore, URL does not really mean anything anymore on todays web

IMO, that stance is both impractical and revisionist.

Quoting RFC 3986, section 1.1.3.:
"A URI can be further classified as a locator, a name, or both.  The 
term 'Uniform Resource Locator' (URL) refers to the subset of URIs 
that, in addition to identifying a resource, provide a means of 
locating the resource by describing its primary access mechanism (e.g., 
its network 'location')."

The practical matter is that the URL subset of URIs is the subset that 
actually works. I think it is rather silly to talk about URIs in 
contexts where everyone knows that the URI needs to be dereferencable 
and only URLs (or only HTTP URLs) actually work.

As for identifiers, character to character comparison works much better 
for identifier equality comparison that full-blown scheme-aware URI 
comparison.

-- 
Henri Sivonen
hsivonen at iki.fi
http://iki.fi/hsivonen/