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whatwg
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HTML2017–2026
whatwg / url

url

URL Standard

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8Distinct people
8Mentions
1Explicit recommenders
635GitHub stars
REPOSITORY AT A GLANCE

What to know before exploring

What it is

URL Standard

GitHub

Where it is used

No documented product use has been verified yet.

What people are saying

https://github.com/whatwg/url/issues/118 is the curl issue, I believe. As I love curl more than any browser I personally side with it. It has support for ldap urls; curl wins. :)

liveoneggs used a recommendation phrase. One indexed comment matches. This is a phrase match, not a verdict.

No classified warning is attached to this page. Read the discussions before treating silence as approval.

Also in these discussions

No other repository is repeatedly linked in the same discussions.

This week on Hacker News

Nov 7–Nov 14 UTC · Direct repository links and separately labeled related project stories. Indexed through 11/14/2026, 3:56:07 PM UTC.

No direct repository links were found in the indexed HN discussions over the past seven days. Older discussions are available below.

Mentions over time

HN mentions by year8 dated mentions

Observed mentions: 2017-12-15 00:31:16 UTC to 2026-06-05 00:58:30 UTC.

012342017-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2018-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 1 mentions; 0 submissions, 1 comments20172018-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2019-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 0 mentions; 0 submissions, 0 comments2019-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2020-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 0 mentions; 0 submissions, 0 comments2020-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2021-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 0 mentions; 0 submissions, 0 comments2021-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2022-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 0 mentions; 0 submissions, 0 comments20212022-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2023-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 1 mentions; 0 submissions, 1 comments2023-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2024-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 4 mentions; 0 submissions, 4 comments2024-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2025-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 0 mentions; 0 submissions, 0 comments2025-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2026-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 0 mentions; 0 submissions, 0 comments2026-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2027-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 2 mentions; 0 submissions, 2 comments. Incomplete calendar period.2026*

* An incomplete calendar period is marked with an outlined bar. Its count is not directly comparable with a full period.

Counts come from the repository’s dated source evidence. Index cutoff: 2026-11-02 08:16:59 UTC.

View mention counts and date ranges
UTC ranges include their start and exclude their end. Select a period to filter the source evidence.
PeriodStart (UTC)End (exclusive, UTC)MentionsSubmissionsComments
20172017-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2018-01-01 00:00:00 UTC101
20182018-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2019-01-01 00:00:00 UTC000
20192019-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2020-01-01 00:00:00 UTC000
20202020-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2021-01-01 00:00:00 UTC000
20212021-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2022-01-01 00:00:00 UTC000
20222022-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2023-01-01 00:00:00 UTC101
20232023-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2024-01-01 00:00:00 UTC404
20242024-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2025-01-01 00:00:00 UTC000
20252025-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2026-01-01 00:00:00 UTC000
2026 (partial)2026-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2027-01-01 00:00:00 UTC202

What Hacker News says

8 sources
evgpbfhnr·Jun 5, 2026
And it gets even more fun when browsers such as firefox implemented this, then decided no we won't do it and removed the feature -- now there's no way to access your router web interface over link-local address... (rationale being that whatwg said no: https://github.com/whatwg/url/issues/392 ; firefox bug https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=700999 ) The "solution" is to use a proxy such as https://github.com/twisteroidambassador/prettysocks/tree/ipv... which incidentally encode the % as a `s` and handle special URLs like this http://fe80--1ff-fe23-4567-890as3.ipv6-literal.net for you through the socks dns resolution feature... I've never found anything else that works recently -_-
In IPv6 zones in URLs are a mistake
domenicd·Apr 18, 2026
As some others have indirectly pointed out, this article conflates two things: - URL parsing/normalization; and - Mapping URLs to resources (e.g. file paths or database entries) to be served from the server, and whether you ever map two distinct URLs to the same resource (either via redirects or just serving the same content). The former has a good spec these days: https://url.spec.whatwg.org/ tells you precisely how to turn a string (e.g., sent over the network via HTTP requests) into a normalized data structure [1] of (scheme, username, password, host, port, path, query, fragment). The article is correct insofar that the spec's path (which is a list of strings, for HTTP URLs) can contain empty string segments. But the latter is much more wild-west, and I don't know of any attempt being made to standardize it. There are tons of possible
Read the rest
choices you can make here: - Should `https://example.com/foo//bar` serve the same resource as `https://example.com/foo/bar`? (What the article focuses on.) - `https://example.com/foo/` vs. `https://example.com/foo` - `https://example.com/foo/` vs. `https://example.com/FOO` - `https://example.com/foo` vs. `https://example.com/fo%6f%` vs. `https://example.com/fo%6F%` - `https://example.com/foo%2Fbar` vs. `https://example.com/foo/bar` - `https://example.com/foo/` vs. `https://example.com/foo.html` Note that some things are normalized during parsing, e.g. `/foo\bar` -> `/foo/bar`, and `/foo/baz/../bar` -> `/foo/bar`. But for paths, very few. Relatedly: - For hosts, many more things are normalized during parsing. (This makes some sense, for security reasons.) - For query, very little is normalized during parsing. But unlike for pathname, there is a standardized format and parser, application/x-www-form-urlencoded [2], that can be used to go further and canonicalize from the raw query string into a list of (name, value) string pairs. Some discussions on the topic of path normalization, especially in terms of mapping the filesystem, in the URL Standard repo: - https://github.com/whatwg/url/issues/552 - https://github.com/whatwg/url/issues/606 - https://github.com/whatwg/url/issues/565 - https://github.com/whatwg/url/issues/729 ----- [1]: https://url.spec.whatwg.org/#url-representation [2]: https://url.spec.whatwg.org/#application/x-www-form-urlencod...
In It is incorrect to "normalize" // in HTTP URL paths
jka·Mar 18, 2022
This reminds me of a microquest that I foolishly embarked on during COVID-19 lockdown: There's no standard, widely-accepted way to unambiguously serialize and deserialize nulls within querystrings. JavaScript is perhaps one of the more frequent client languages for that, but Python and many other server-side languages are affected too. Could we do something about that? I liked the look of the proposal at https://github.com/whatwg/url/issues/469 that was working towards this. In short, it provides the ability for "?a&b=" to represent the variable "a" containing null and "b" containing an empty-string.
In Tony Hoare's Null References: The Billion Dollar Mistake

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