What is authoring requirements even about?

[domenic]

It is unclear to me what these mean. What if I write a URL that does not conform to these? How will browsers treat it? What will happen to me---will the "URL validator" be mad? Or will they just not be usable as URLs at all? Basically, how do these relate to "parse exceptions" and "conformance errors"? Again, examples may help.

[rubys]

How browsers are to parse URLs is defined in the Parsing Rules section. In some cases, non-conforming URLs will be unusable. In other cases, browsers will "correct" the non-conforming URLs.

I'll also add that the rules in the authoring requirements section are intentionally more strict than what browsers will (someday!) implement interoperably. And that is because there are other consumers of URLs that may implement one of the RFCs that the URL Standard is intending to supersede.

Would adding text like the above to the top of the Authoring section address your comment?

[domenic]

Maybe. It's still unclear what the relationship is between the authoring rules, parse exceptions, and conformance errors. It's also not clear who this section benefits, or why it is normative, in comparison to e.g. the "signal a conformance error" steps.

[sideshowbarker]

It's still unclear what the relationship is between the authoring rules, parse exceptions, and conformance errors. It's also not clear who this section benefits, or why it is normative, in comparison to e.g. the "signal a conformance error" steps.

If it's possible for the URL spec to define the concept of a (generic) "document", I think it could then require that a conforming document must only contain URLs that meet the relevant conformance requirements in the spec.

I suggest that because in the HTML spec this issue is addressed essentially by having the concept of an (HTML) "document"—and more specifically, a "conforming document"—which makes the related (authoring) requirements testable against something concrete, in the isolation from the author/system that produced the document. So instead of being "authoring (conformance) requirements", those statement become "document-conformance requirements" (and a conformance checker (validator) can check/test them).

Of course the URL spec shouldn't be restricted to defining requirements for URLs in HTML documents only. For the purposes of URL spec, we could define a "document" as anything that contains any instances of URLs, which could be a thing (resource) written in HTML, SVG, or other markup languages, or CSS, or even JavaScript scripts—or a PDF or a Word doc, etc.

[annevk]

The relationship ought to be that conformance is no errors during parsing whatsoever. Over time we could remove some harmless errors depending on whether the thinking around RFC 3986 evolves (or if we stop caring about it entirely).