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The current text of http://url.spec.whatwg.org/#goals starts with: [[ The URL standard standardizes URLs, aiming to make them fully interoperable... ]] Putting aside the fact that this is a tautology, I suggest that the spec might benefit from some small additional introductory text in this section which actually describes the goals of the document. I suggest something like: "The Uniform Resource Locator (URL) is a universal identifier. This document standardizes the URL, specifies the parsing and serialization of URLs and their components and defines a URL API with the goal of maximizing interoperability. Additionally it seeks to:" [and then the existing bulleted list]
I tried to remove the tautology. The rest seems covered under the first bullet point. https://github.com/whatwg/url/commit/f142cb3037870fe83cfdf6885b79243adb19adce
Hi Anne - Thanks for that, but with all due respect, I disagree. I don't think the point is covered in the first bullet or any of the bullets. I think the URL standard should define URL at least once or at least say what it stands for. Please consider the naive reader who is trying to figure out what this document is about and what its point of view is? I know you would like to keep the text as simple as possible and I think this is a good goal, but I think this can be accomplished without adding any flowery language.
Oh, you want the expansion of the term somewhere? I don't think the Goals section would be a good fit. Perhaps a History or a Preface section similar to https://encoding.spec.whatwg.org/ would be good.
I've also been thinking about an abstract along these lines: "The URL Standard defines the internet's identifiers, URLs."
That's great - and yes. I'm happy to work up something and submit it as a pull request if you like.
Yeah that seems fine. If you don't get around to it feel free to file another bug.