Edition for Web Developers — Last Updated 16 January 2026
A string is a valid non-empty URL if it is a valid URL string but it is not the empty string.
A string is a valid URL potentially surrounded by spaces if, after stripping leading and trailing ASCII whitespace from it, it is a valid URL string.
A string is a valid non-empty URL potentially surrounded by spaces if, after stripping leading and trailing ASCII whitespace from it, it is a valid non-empty URL.
This specification defines the URL about:legacy-compat as a reserved,
though unresolvable, about: URL, for use in DOCTYPEs in HTML documents when needed for
compatibility with XML tools. [ABOUT]
This specification defines the URL about:html-kind as a reserved,
though unresolvable, about: URL, that is used as an
identifier for kinds of media tracks. [ABOUT]
This specification defines the URL about:srcdoc as a reserved, though
unresolvable, about: URL, that is used as the URL of iframe srcdoc documents.
[ABOUT]
A URL matches about:blank if its scheme is "about", its path contains a single string "blank", its
username and password are the empty string, and its host is null.
Such a URL's query and fragment can be non-null. For example, the URL
record created by parsing "about:blank?foo#bar" matches about:blank.
A URL matches about:srcdoc if its scheme is "about", its path contains a single string "srcdoc",
its query is null, its username and password are the empty string, and its host is null.
The reason that matches about:srcdoc ensures that the
URL's query is null is because it is not
possible to create an iframe srcdoc document whose URL has a non-null query, unlike Documents whose URL matches about:blank. In other
words, the set of all URLs that match
about:srcdoc only vary in their fragment.