What to do with /reference-implementation/

[nlevitt]

From my reading of https://url.spec.whatwg.org/ only "%2e" should be percent-decoded if it appears in the path section (haven't examined other sections of the url yet).
The reference implementation doesn't seem to decode any percent-encoded stuff in the path (not even %2e). But my browser (chromium) appears to percent-decode a bunch of stuff. Guessing approximately the inverse of the "default encode set".

[domenic]

It seems you are running into a general category of bug known as "the reference implementation isn't updated and should be deleted" :).

This just seems like a Chrome bug though. Safari Tech Preview and Firefox follow the spec. We don't generally consider such things spec bugs unless the majority (or preferably all) implementations contradict the spec.

[domenic]

Well, OK, Firefox and Safari tech preview don't decode %2e either, so that's not great.

[nlevitt]

Please don't delete the reference implementation! It's still super useful, if only to see what your browser does.

Surprised to see this divergence among browsers.

Fewer special cases seems better, everything else being equal. WHATWG seems to be the only one with a special case (%2e), the browsers either decode everything or decode nothing. So maybe WHATWG should ditch that special case. :)

[sleevi]

Is this just Issue #87 expressed differently?

[sleevi]

See also Pull Request #156

[annevk]

@sleevi I think it is, but we can keep this issue for deciding how to handle the reference implementation being out-of-date.

I guess at some point I should take some time to wrap the tools around https://github.com/jsdom/whatwg-url (which is maintained) instead and maybe move the whole setup from the url.spec.whatwg.org domain.

[annevk]

Unless anyone has a better idea I think I'm just going to 410 this URL space. It's clearly causing some confusion and I was never quite comfortable with the idea of hosting official reference implementations anyway.

Having a Live URL Viewer would still be nice however. Perhaps I should look into how to use jsdom/whatwg-url and invoke that from the existing viewer code...

[annevk]

I started working on an update to /reference-implementation which I'll host on quuz.org I suppose: https://github.com/annevk/live-url-viewer. Feedback welcome there through issues.

So I suspect that once that is up and running I'll create 301s rather than 410s.

[domenic]

Oh fun; I look forward forward to contributing some patches to that over the holidays.