approachabe & frugal & composable

[Martin Keegan]

On Tue, 2 Jun 2020, colecmac at protonmail.com wrote:

>> At this point I am honestly considering speccing that => lines may
> *only* use URLs whose scheme corresponds to an application protocol.
> Permitting *any* RFC-compliant URL is just way, way too open-ended and
> defeats the point of so much careful efforts elsewhere in the protocol.
>
> I would be in favour of this, I don't want to start seeing pages that
> have tags on them.

I believe I earlier proposed something along the lines of whitelisting or 
blacklisting of URL schemes, but I don't really have a coherent proposal.

Ultimately there is a tradeoff which must be made between the benefits of 
the IETF-derived approach (existing, documented standards; existing, 
debugged implementations; conceptual familiarity) and the drawbacks (the 
assumptions with which these come freighted; the "robustness principle" 
rhetoric; the capture of IETF standards-making by particular interests and 
philosophies).

I don't think the existing standards-making systems can be relied upon to 
produce something clean and module like a resource locator that couldn't 
be extended into a Turing-complete language. Therefore, if we want to 
have a minimalist alternative, we may need to depart somewhat from 
re-using IETF / W3C standards, which I would support. The WWW already 
exists for people who want the more complicated/ornate systems.

Mk