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The javascript: in URLs has from my reading on the internet been around for a very long time while not being an actual standard. The protocol is currently part of the HTML spec. When was this introduced into the HTML spec? I did a cursory search of the HTML4 standard and did not find it. I also found this IETF draft from 2010 proposing the resource identifier scheme.

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    I think you'll have to search the version history of the WHATWG spec, to see when that section was added. Commented Jul 23, 2021 at 19:21
  • Is there any way to search version history? Now that the HTML spec is a "living standard" Commented Jul 24, 2021 at 0:03
  • There's a github repo github.com/whatwg/html but I'm not sure how to search for this. The files have .wattsi extensions and I don't know how to view them. I found branches and issues mentioning JS URLs back in 2015. So they were added between the IETF draft in 2010 and these issues in 2015. Commented Jul 24, 2021 at 16:51
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    Why does the date matter? If it's just curiosity, you could try asking in Retrocomputing. Commented Jul 24, 2021 at 16:52
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    I know, but it tends to be the place to ask about history of things like this. I don't see how it's a programming question. Unless you need to know whether a particular old browser version will support it. Commented Jul 24, 2021 at 19:38

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It looks like Ian Hickson added the "Javascript Protocol" section to the spec (basically just to indicate an intent to define it) on Thu, 25 Jan 2007 20:12:17 +0000

(Earlier versions do mention "javascript: URIs", but mostly in comments, questions, and things to be done.)

The commit of Thu Mar 1 22:41:49 2007 +0000 ("behold: the javascript: URI") is the first to provide detailed semantics, although it relies on an external "JSURI" reference.

The commit of Fri Nov 15 15:56:16 2013 +0000 ("Move javascript: processing entirely into HTML") is the first that doesn't need the "JSURI" reference.

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