"URL" is what everyone outside the standards world calls them. The few people who understand what on earth IRI, URN, URI, and URL are supposed to mean and how to distinguish them have demonstrated that they are able to understand such complicated terminology and can deal with the reuse of the term "URL". Others, who think "URL" mean exactly what the HTML5 spec defines it as, have not demonstrated an ability to understand these subtleties and are better off with us using the term they're familiar with.

The real solution is for the URI and IRI specs to be merged, for the URI spec to change its definitions to match what "URL" is defined as in HTML5 (e.g. finally defining error handling as part of the core spec), and for everyone to stop using terms other than "URL".

Thus, marking this WONTFIX.

The "real" solution, as proposed by Ian Hickson, has been discussed, is controversial, and is not going to happen.

As far as I can tell, we should either re-open this bug, or track the issue in the Tracker (not sure whether it is covered by http://www.w3.org/html/wg/tracker/issues/56)

Reassigned to me pending discussion of what further action is needed.

Since Ian has given his disposition, I think a tracker issue would be appropriate. It would probably be worthwhile to have a separate issue for the naming, as opposed to for updating the spec reference.

(In reply to comment #4)
> Since Ian has given his disposition, I think a tracker issue would be
> appropriate. It would probably be worthwhile to have a separate issue for the
> naming, as opposed to for updating the spec reference.

http://www.w3.org/html/wg/tracker/issues/78

moved to Tracker

http://www.w3.org/html/wg/tracker/issues/78

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I added comments to Bug 8116  (http://www.w3.org/Bugs/Public/show_bug.cgi?id=8116 ) which doesn't seem to be linked here.

Note that change proposal
http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/public-html/2010Feb/0882.html for ISSUE-56
(http://www.w3.org/html/wg/tracker/issues/56) at least explains that this
specification uses "URL" in ways different than the rest of the web community
(and also, by using URL for relative forms) in ways that are not even common in
the public literature.

Note also that the IETF document draft-ietf-iri-3987bis
(http://tools.ietf.org/wg/iri/draft-ietf-iri-3987bis/) contains advice about
using "URL" in formal documents, and there is a bug report
http://trac.tools.ietf.org/wg/iri/trac/ticket/9 which discusses that issue.

Since the response to this bug was "We (the standards community) really need to
give up on this naming nonsense and just go back to URL, which is what everyone
else calls them.", it would seem appropriate get the standards community to
follow that advice.

See also
http://masinter.blogspot.com/2010/03/resources-are-angels-urls-are-pins.html
for some history.