/url-specification

A rephrasing and generalisation of the WHATWG URL Standard

Primary LanguageHTML

URL Specification

This is the project page for a new URL Specification.
There is a project page for a reference implementation here.

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This URL Specification is a reverse specification and a generalisation of the WHATWG URL Standard. It aims to be fully compatible with the WHATWG standard, but in addition, it specifies elementary operations for reference resolution and it provides a formal grammar.

A main goal of this project is to enable and support efforts towards a single Unified URL Standard that includes a normative specification of URL handling by web browsers and that resolves the incompatibilities between RFC 3986, RFC 3987 and the WHATWG URL Standard.

This specification does not attempt to be such a unified URL standard itself. Instead it rephrases and generalises the WHATWG standard. This is a necessary intermediate step because the WHATWG standard is written in a style that makes it difficult to identify the differences between the specifications directly. It will be relatively simple to unify the standards once this work has been completed.