[whatwg] [URL] Starting work on a URL spec

[Boris Zbarsky]

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