Re: How browsers display URIs with %-encoding (Opera/Firefox FAIL)

On 2011/07/27 10:41, Boris Zbarsky wrote:
> On 7/26/11 9:03 PM, "Martin J. Dürst" wrote:

>> A quick check here indicates that it shows D%FCrst. That's the right
>> thing to do, but it will confuse your user. Being consistent and always
>> showing D%FCrst would be less confusing.
>
> Having the mouseover feedback match the post-click location bar is the
> strongest argument for changing the former, actually. I'm a little
> surprised they don't match. Definitely worth filing a bug. Let me know
> if you'd prefer I do that.

Yes, please go ahead.


>> People use software, and software gets used by people. The two have to
>> work together to get the job done. If there's something that makes sense
>> to the user but not to software, then something is wrong
>
> Then something is wrong all the time.... There are lots of concepts that
> make sense to users but not software and vice versa. The point of a user
> interface is to try to reduce the impedance mismatch as much as possible.

Agreed. But for non-UTF-8 URIs, it's pretty much a game of Whac-A-Mole. 
You try to reduce impedance somewhere, it pops up somewhere else. See above.


>> IRIs were designed to make sense to the user and to make sense in
>> software. The problem is that that's only possible if we nail down the
>> encoding for the conversion (to UTF-8 as it happens), and therewith give
>> up on converting for other encodings.
>
> Agreed, and if everyone were using IRIs well we would not be having this
> conversation in the first place. The problem is people aren't in
> practice....

We aren't there yet, indeed. But we are moving in that direction, and we 
can help people along with some road signs (such as displaying D%FCrst 
when that's in the underlying href attribute :-).

Regards,   Martin.

Received on Wednesday, 27 July 2011 10:53:47 UTC