Subject: [Uri-review] Request to review about URI scheme

From: Joseph A Holsten <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 21 May 2009 23:16:25 -0500

I've published draft-holsten-about-uri-scheme[1], which defines the  
about URI scheme. It is ready for public review. There is also some  
background for the scheme under HTML ACTION-103[2].

The main outstanding issue is a normative reference to HTML5, which  
defines some behavior for about:blank. It seems wrong to normatively  
reference a working draft, and the best way to solve the issue isn't  
clear.

Thank you for your consideration,
Joseph Holsten

1: http://www.ietf.org/internet-drafts/draft-holsten-about-uri-scheme-01.txt
2: http://www.w3.org/html/wg/tracker/actions/103

---

From: Bjoern Hoehrmann <[email-masked]>
Date: Fri, 22 May 2009 06:46:15 +0200

>background for the scheme under HTML ACTION-103[2].

There are several contradictions in the draft. For example, the Abstract
says resolution is entirely implementation defined, then goes on to say
this is not the case for about:blank; another example are the IANA Con-
siderations, they request both permanent and provisional status for the
scheme.

Section 4.1 fails to define what an empty resource is. It is also
unclear what exactly is an "about:blank URI", for example, does that
include an "about:BLANK URI", or a "about:blank? URI"?

BCP 115 requires a description of character encoding issues and IRI com-
patibility. The draft fails to account for that.

Editorially, the introduction is a bad place to reference the RFC 2119
keywords, a separate section called e.g. "Terminology" would be a better
place. Also, in section 4, the statement "SHOULD NOT need" is difficult
to understand correctly.

The statement in section 3 that "No relative URI syntax is defined."
does not make sense. Processing of relative references happens at a
different layer than about scheme specific processing.

In section 5 the statement "About URIs SHOULD NOT cause the application
to modify any data." is probably misphrased, clearly, a string cannot
cause an application to do anything. Perhaps you mean to say that imple-
mentations of the scheme should not modify data when processing about
resource identifiers.

The encoding considerations in the template appear to be incorrect. For
example, percent-encoding is also allowed in the fragment and query
components. On that I will also note that it is incorrect to define the
fragment part in the scheme registration; the scheme specific part of a
resource identifier ends immediately before the fragment identifier.

Further, proper content for the field would rather be something about
character encodings and IRI processing. On that I would recommend to
simply define an IRI scheme rather than an URI scheme, the mapping to
URIs would then be covered by the IRI specificiation.

>reference a working draft, and the best way to solve the issue isn't  

The draft does not seem to rely on "HTML5" at all, in fact, it seems
rather that the "HTML5" draft has "about:blank" specific processing
requirements for a specific class of applications. If so, then you
can avoid the problem by simply removing any mention of this from the
draft.
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