Re: a bad idea (fwd)

At 2:25p -0700 07/15/96, Marcus E. Hennecke wrote:
>On Mon, 15 Jul 1996 13:28:22 -0700, "Marc Salomon" <marc@ckm.ucsf.edu> wrote:
>> Marcus E. Hennecke <marcush@crc.ricoh.com> wrote:
>> |It would break Netscape. It simply takes everything in the quotes to be
>> |the URL, including spaces. If you try:
>> |<a href="http://foo.com/ http://bar.com/">Follow this link</a>
>>
>> It didn't used to break Navigator, at least when I tested it last year.
>
>I guess the reason they do it that way now is so they can do:
>
><a href="mailto:foo@bar.com?subject=Some subject">Mail me</a>
>
>which of course breaks every other browser, including older versions of
>Netscape.
>
>> If what you say is true, that means that Navigator's interpretation of a
>>URI is
>> noncompliant per RFC 1738, Section 2.2, and this convention would expose an
>> already broken implementation.
>
>Did Netscape ever give a s**t about standards? However, AFAIK, spaces are
>not allowed inside URLs, so if one appears inside a URL attribute, I am
>not sure what is more appropriate: encode the space (%20) or truncate the
>URL at that point. Netscape appears to encode spaces and I would think
>this is within its rights.

This is why I suggested using the generic CONTENT attribute of a META tag.
Since it is not a "URI field", it can be parsed in whatever manner is
appropriate for the NAMEd content (in this case, a space-delimited list of
URIs). Of course there is the added benefit of leaving the HTML in the
body much less cluttered -- I want tags in the body to take up as *little*
room as possible, to facilitate easy manual editing of body *content*.

__________________________________________________________________________
    Walter Ian Kaye <boo@best.com>     Programmer - Excel, AppleScript,
          Mountain View, CA                         ProTERM, FoxPro, HTML
 http://www.natural-innovations.com/     Musician - Guitarist, Songwriter

Received on Tuesday, 16 July 1996 20:31:33 UTC