alt Hacker NewsAnytime I end up wondering "Why do we have feature X on the web?" I tend to up end reading through proposals and I always end up finding a suitable answer that makes me wonder no more. For this specific feature, there is lots of prior discussions about why this is needed in the first place here: https://github.com/whatwg/urlpattern
Based on https://github.com/whatwg/urlpattern/blob/main/explainer.md it looks like they specifically wanted it as a way to scope service workers so it's easy to make them only run on certain parts of a site, and viewed giving people something easy to use for other URL matching as a nice bonus.