[whatwg] HTML5 and URI Templates

[Julian Reschke]

Geoffrey Sneddon wrote:
>>> On Dec 16, 2007, at 05:28, James M Snell wrote:
>>>> The gist of the idea (which I believe may have been brought up before
>>>> but I'm not certain) is to allow the use of a URI Template in place of
>>>> the form element action attribute, and to use form elements to provide
>>>> the replacement values, e.g.
>>>>
>>>> <form template="http://example.org{-prefix|/|foo}?bar={bar}"
>>>>     method="POST">
>>>> Foo: <input name="foo" type="input" >
>>>> Bar: <input name="bar" type="input">
>>>> </form>
>>> What's the backward-compatibility story of this feature? (Both 
>>> behavior of URI templates in legacy browsers and ensuring that 
>>> existing content doesn't use braces.)
>>
>> Braces are not allowed in URIs (in case somebody forgot :-). That's 
>> exactly why URI Templates can use them.
> 
> There are sites that rely on braces in URIs. You can't just go and 

No, they rely on user agents not checking for syntactically correct 
URIs. They aren't using URIs.

> change their meaning, breaking the sites, specs be damned. If RFC 3986 
> defined what to do with non-conformant URIs, we wouldn't have this issue.

Oh well. Are you really believing this?

RFC2396 and RFC3986 define what a URI is. They do not and don't need to 
say anything about things which aren't URIs.

So, if at all, it would be the job of the HTML spec to say what to do 
with pages that use non-URIs where URIs are expected.

That being said -- James suggested "template" instead of "action" anyway.

BR, Julian