September 7, 2014

The URL mess

(updated 9/8/14)

One of the main inventions of the Web was the URL.  And I've gotten stuck trying to help fix up the standards so that they actually work.

The standards around URLs, though, have gotten themselves into an organizational political quandary to the point where it's like many other situations where a polarized power struggle keeps the right thing from happening.

Here's an update to an earlier description of the situation:

URLs were originally defined as ASCII only. Although it was quickly determined that it was desirable to allow non-ASCII characters, shoehorning utf-8 into ASCII-only systems was unacceptable; at the time, Unicode was not so widely deployed, and there were other issues. The tack was taken to leave "URI" alone and define a new protocol element, "IRI";  RFC 3987 published in 2005 (in sync with the RFC 3986 update to the URI definition).   (This is a very compressed history of what really happened.)

The IRI-to-URI transformation specified in RFC 3987  had options; it wasn't a deterministic path. The URI-to-IRI transformation was also heuristic, since there was no guarantee that %xx-encoded bytes in the URI were actually meant to be %xx percent-hex-encoded bytes of a utf8 encoding of a Unicode string.

To address issues and to fix URL for HTML5, a new working group was established in IETF in 2009 (The IRI working group). Despite years of development, the group didn't get the attention of those active in WHATWG, W3C or Unicode consortium, and the IRI group was closed in 2014, with the consolation that the documents that were being developed in the IRI working group could be updated as individual submissions or within the "applications area" working group.  In particular, one of the IRI working group items was to update the "scheme guidelines and registration process",  which is currently under development in IETF's application area.

Independently, the HTML5 specs in WHATWG/W3C defined "Web Address", in an attempt to match what some of the browsers were doing. This definition (mainly a published parsing algorithm) was moved out into a separate WHATWG document called "URL".

The world has also moved on. ICANN has approved non-ascii top level domains, and IDN 2003 and 2008 didn't really address IRI Encoding. Unicode consortium is working on UTS #46.

The big issue is to make the IRI -to-URI transformation non-ambiguous and stable.  But I don't know what to do about non-domain-name non-ascii 'authority' fields.  There is some evidence that some processors are %xx-hex-encoding the UTF8 of domain names in some circumstances.

There are four umbrella organizations (IETF, W3C, WHATWG, Unicode consortium) and multiple documents, and it's unclear whether there's a trajectory to make them consistent:

IETF

Dave Thaler (mainly) has updated http://tools.ietf.org/html/draft-ietf-appsawg-uri-scheme-reg, which needs comunity review.

The IRI working group closed, but work can continue in the APPS area working group. Documents sitting needing update, abandoned now, are three drafts (iri-3987bis, iri-comparison, iri-bidi-guidelines) intended originally to obsolete RFC 3987.

Other work in IETF that is relevant but I'm not as familiar with is the IDN/IDNA work for internationalizing domain names, since the rules for canonicalization, equivalence, encoding, parsing, and displaying domain names needs to be compatible with the rules for doing those things to URLs that contain domain names.

In addition, there's quite a bit of activity around URNs and library identifiers in the URN working group, work that is ignored by other organizations.

W3C

The W3C has many existing recommendations which reference the IETF URI/IRI specs in various ways (for example, XML has its own restricted/expanded allowed syntax for URL-like-things). The HTML5 spec references something, the TAG seems to be involved, as well as the sysapps working group, I believe. I haven't tracked what's happened in the last few months.

WHATWG

The WHATWG spec is http://url.spec.whatwg.org/  (Anne, Leif). This fits in with the WHATWG principle of focusing on specifying what is important for browsers, so it leaves out many of the topics in the IETF specs. I don't think there is any reference to registration, and (when I checked last) had a fixed set of relative schemes: ftp, file, gopher (a mistake?), http, https, ws, wss, used IDNA 2003 not 2008, and was (perhaps, perhaps not) at odds with IETF specs.

Unicode consortium

Early versions of  #46 and I think others recommends translating toAscii and back using punycode  ? But it wasn't specific about which schemes.

Conclusion


From a user or developer point of view, it makes no sense for there to be a proliferation of definitions of URL, or a large variety URL syntax categories. Yes, currently there is a proliferation of slightly incompatible implementations.  This shouldn't be a competitive feature. Yet the organizations involved have little incentive to incur the overhead of cooperation, especially since there is an ongoing power struggle for legitimacy and control. The same dynamic applies to the Encoding spec, and, to a lesser degree, handling of MIME types (sniffing) and multipart/form-data.

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