DISQUS

Actually, I think I agree with Roy's point here. He hasn't been entirely explicit with what he means by "architecture", but I think that's understandable in such a terse comment.

My guess is that the aspect of web "architecture" to which he refers is the fundamental separation between identification, retrieval, and representation: URIs identify things, we often (or usually) use HTTP to get them, and HTML is one of the ways we represent things. The argument is that if HTML goes monkeying around with the other two layers you're in danger of breaking something.

If people think they can come up with an identifier scheme that lets them guess things about the representation of a resource on the basis of its identifier they are violating the "architecture" of the web. I doubt the (on the whole, quite wise) authors of HTML5 have any intention of making such a mistake, but they court the possibility by claiming any authority over the internal structure of URIs. Better to just say "this bit of the syntax is a string that happens to be a URI, as defined by the official URI spec" than to dive into a URI's internal syntax.

Or at least that's my interpretation of what Roy is saying. You may disagree over whether this layering is in fact fundamental to the web's "architecture", but I think Roy does refer to a reasonable definition of that term.