how browsers transform URLs

[Gervase Markham]

Forwarding to .dom (because there are recommendations for script
interfaces, which Erik claims are particularly inconsistent) and to
.platform. Apologies if either or both is the wrong place.

Gerv


-------- Original Message --------
Subject: how browsers transform URLs
Date: Wed, 25 Nov 2009 11:49:36 -0800
From: Erik van der Poel <***@google.com>

We are happy to announce the open source release of Client URL
Internet Emission Sniffer (CURLIES).

The purpose of this project is to see how browsers and other Web
clients transform URLs as they access them. This is done by generating
a number of test cases and having each client load the test files
while running a packet sniffer to capture the network emissions.
Reports are then generated from the sniffed packets, highlighting
differences between the clients. For further details and test results,
see the project site:

http://code.google.com/p/curlies/
http://code.google.com/p/curlies/wiki/DesignDocumentForClientURLInternetEmissionSniffer

I have also written some recommendations for browser developers. While
the HTML5 Web Addresses spec already describes how to parse and
resolve a URL, I have taken this a step further to include the DOM
interfaces that can be used to obtain IRIs, URIs and Unicode host
names.

http://code.google.com/p/curlies/wiki/RecommendationsForBrowserDevelopers
http://www.w3.org/html/wg/href/draft

Happy Thanksgiving!

Erik

PS Many thanks to Shaopeng Jia (Google), who did most of the actual work.

[Boris Zbarsky]

Post by Gervase Markham
Forwarding to .dom (because there are recommendations for script
interfaces, which Erik claims are particularly inconsistent) and to
.platform. Apologies if either or both is the wrong place.

For what it's worth, I suspect that any changes to our behavior for this
stuff would need to be done very carefully and still lead to breakage.

That, and some of the suggestions are just wishful thinking (e.g.
changing what getAttribute does).

-Boris

[Gervase Markham]

Post by Boris Zbarsky
For what it's worth, I suspect that any changes to our behavior for this
stuff would need to be done very carefully and still lead to breakage.

You may well be right. However, that's what we have development builds
for :-) And we've changed behaviour to move in the direction of
cross-browser compatibility before, right?

Would you or someone else be able to file bugs on those items where we
are in the minority and where you think there's some chance we could fix
it without breaking the world?

Gerv

[Boris Zbarsky]

Post by Gervase Markham
Would you or someone else be able to file bugs on those items where we
are in the minority and where you think there's some chance we could fix
it without breaking the world?

I doubt I'll have time to do the relevant auditing in the foreseeable
future.

-Boris