I think we should discount The Widget Formerly Known As The Address Bar from these sorts of discussions. The omnibox[chrome]/awesomebar[ff]/frustrationmaker[edg

I think we should discount The Widget Formerly Known As The Address Bar from these sorts of discussions. The omnibox[chrome]/awesomebar[ff]/frustrationmaker[edge]/etc. is a field where a human can type or paste all sorts of guff, and where the browser can present the human with a representation of the location of the cat video currently playing on the screen (complete with optional scheme, padlock icon, elided path elements, fancy colours and shading, Unicode snowmen, etc.) Sometimes the guff from the human looks exactly the same as a URL, sometimes it's close enough to work out what they meant, and the rest of the time it's just guff. If it looks exactly like a URL or IRI, it's trivial for the browser to turn it into a proper URI and emit an appropriate request. If it's close, then some assumptions can be made, but the browser is still responsible for constructing the actual URI. That doesn't mean that what the human typed has any bearing on the underlying protocols or standards, or the definition of a URI/URL.