From: t.p. [daedulus(_at_)btconnect(_dot_)com]
The I-D points out the impossibility of specifying how to handle the many
different tokens that a browser may encounter in the about: scheme and then
goes on to tell us what Opera does.
I am uncomfortable with a Standards Track document telling us about the
behaviour of one and only one product, with, the text being in the body of the
I-D, an implication that this text has Normative status (earlier versions of
this I-D also included Mozilla Firefox).
I have the sense that we aren't looking at the same draft. My copy of
draft-ietf-appsawg-about-uri-scheme-04 doesn't contain a list of the
Opera uses of "about:". The only mentions of Opera are 'for instance,
the Opera web browser redirects all "about" URIs except "about:blank"
to its internal "opera" URIs' and (implicitly) a description of how
Opera acts on "about:blank". What I see in -04 looks quite reasonable
to me regarding this issue.
On the other hand, I think an improvement could be made in the
terminology. The draft uses "special-purpose" to mean what is
normally called "standardized", that is, all applications are expected
to handle it in the same way. The "application-specific" values are
what is normally called "proprietary", but "application-specific" is a
reasonable synonym.
In any case, it is a good idea to properly document and standardize
the "about" URI scheme itself, which this draft is needed for.
Dale