If a KURL has a null base, it is marked as invalidated but the relative portion is set as the URL. These invalidated URLs can then be used accidentally, as they do contain some data. It seems that using KURLs with unvalidated relative paths could cause problems, so I think it would be safer (and more correct) to make the URL empty when a KURL is invalidated. I'm going to do a bunch of testing to ensure this doesn't break anything, but in the meantime wanted a bug to track opinions on this.
This bug came up because this behavior differs from GKURL and revealed a bug in SVGImageLoader.
Lets look at the specific symptoms and consider the best way to fix them. There may well be places where we want to carry around arbitrary strings even if KURL thinks they are invalid URLs -- it would be risky to make this change to such an often-used class. The fact that Google’s separate version of KURL did not preserve this feature is interesting, but we haven’t tested the vast number of WebKit clients on Mac OS X, for example, with Google’s implementation. So we don’t know what the repercussions of starting to completely disallow invalid URLs would be.
Fixing symptoms sounds reasonable. I understand that with such a core piece of infrastructure, such a fundamental change is extremely difficult to make. Here is a bug about a specific symptom I would like to fix: https://bugs.webkit.org/show_bug.cgi?id=34492 Should this bug remain open to track any further symptoms that arise, or should it be closed and individual bugs filed for each symptom? Thanks.
Generally we file bugs about actual problems rather than design issues. I added comments to that other bug.
Individual issues related to the different in KURL and KURLGoogle can be tracked in their own bugs. Closing this one.