WHATWG URL class can't handle urls with non-standard protocols

[feross]

Summary

What is needed. A one paragraph explanation of what this is about.

Folks interested in dweb protocols might be interested to know that the WHATWG URL object in browsers don't parse dat:// or ipfs: or ipns: or magnet: or almost any non-standard URL scheme in either Chrome or Firefox.

Motivation

Why is it needed? What does it unlock?

Without built-in support for parsing these protocols, we have to ship our own userland implementations of URL parsers like https://github.com/defunctzombie/node-url which adds lots of JS to our bundles.

Centralized protocols like http: shouldn't get special treatment by the URL parser. Plus, URL works correctly in Node.js and Safari. We just need to fix the implementations in Chrome and Firefox.

Bug reports here:

• Chrome https://bugs.chromium.org/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=734880
• Firefox https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1374505

[pfrazee]

FWIW in Beaker (which uses Chromium via Electron) the dat: URLs parse correctly. I believe it's because dat: is registered in a Chromium system as a "Standard URL" and so it is given the parsing rules of HTTP URLs, but I haven't checked to see if it's a behavior that Electron patches in (rather than Chromium doing it). I just mention this because this might not be terribly difficult to solve in Chromium if your scheme design is similar to HTTPS.