Anyone here have any experience with protocol relative URLs, that is
URLs of the form "//some.domain.org/file.ext"? URLs of this form are
uncommon but appear compliant with RFC 1808.
A possible application of protocol relative URLs for MediaWiki is that
they could be used remove the problem of needing duplicate parsings of
pages containing external (and cross-domain) links in order to support
HTTPS. With that issue out of the way the only impediment to high
performance SSL is connection setup which can be addressed with
dedicated crypto cards or crypto enhanced CPUs like Ultrasparc T1/T2.
I've confirmed protocol relatives they work in the browsers I have
ready access to. Googling around I found
http://nedbatchelder.com/blog/200710/httphttps_transitions_and_relative_url…
which claims "The HTML 2 spec references RFC 1808 which describes this
behavior, and was written in 1995. I know this syntax works in IE6,
IE7, FF2, and Safari 2 and 3. I don't know of any browsers in which it
doesn't work."
Anyone here have practical experience with URLs of this form?