urlver10

urlver10 is an open-source library and data format designed for URL normalization and verification. It provides a framework for parsing, validating, and canonicalizing URLs to ensure consistency across systems, databases, and services.

Origin and development: The project emerged from the URL verification community in the early 2020s. The first public release, urlver10 1.0, appeared in 2023, with ongoing development by the Ver10 Foundation and a community of contributors. It is released under an open-source license.

Design and features: urlver10 defines portable components that can be applied to strings representing URLs. Core functions include parsing into scheme, authority, path, query, and fragment; normalization rules such as lowercasing hosts, resolving dot-segments, IDNA for international hosts, and standardizing percent-encoding. It also offers validation against common URL schemes and safety checks.

Usage and ecosystem: Implementations exist for multiple languages and platforms, including JavaScript, Python, Go, and Java. It is used to deduplicate links, prepare URLs for indexing, and enforce consistent linking in content management systems. Some tools expose a canonical URL for caching and analytics.

Reception and limitations: urlver10 is treated as a practical utility rather than a formal standard. While it reduces ambiguity, normalization can have edge cases and privacy implications in sensitive datasets. Different platforms may apply slightly different rules, so interoperability depends on explicit versioning.

See also: URL, URL encoding, URL normalization, IDNA, punycode, canonicalization, link checker.