On Wed, 24 Oct 2012, Jan Algermissen wrote:
On Oct 24, 2012, at 1:47 AM, Ian Hickson <ian(_at_)hixie(_dot_)ch> wrote:
On Wed, 24 Oct 2012, Jan Algermissen wrote:
What matters is that nothing of the existing URI spec *changes*.
Can you agree on that?
Do you mean the actual text, or the normative meaning of the text?
I ideally mean the actual text, but it might be that there is some
overlap in the construction algorithms - I am not expert enough there to
judge that.
Well I definitely don't think we should constrain a spec editor to being
forced to use text he didn't even write, that seems like a very poor way
to write a spec. Especially given that here the text is already spread
across two specs (URI and IRI).
I think it makes sense to be conservative and say that URL synatx
conformance requirements should probably not change from what the IRI spec
says today unless there's a really compelling reason, though.
The point really was to make it very clear that *additional* stuff is
going to be said and that existing implementations that follow the URI
spec strictly remain conforming.
Well unless there's a very good reason (e.g. following the current specs
involves a security vulnerability or something like that) then I'd think
that was a reasonably strong technical requirement, sure. But that's
independent of how the spec is written. It's trivial to write a spec that
uses existing text while making all existing implementations
non-conforming, for example (just add a line that says "implementations
MUST NOT do what the following section says" or something...).
--
Ian Hickson U+1047E )\._.,--....,'``. fL
http://ln.hixie.ch/ U+263A /, _.. \ _\ ;`._ ,.
Things that are impossible just take longer. `._.-(,_..'--(,_..'`-.;.'