Re: a bad idea (fwd)

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.

> |Different URLs may differ in access time, proximity, language, data
> |format (e.g. GIF, JPEG, PNG), compression (e.g. none, zip, gzip, etc.),
> |size, charset, etc.
> 
> Part of this could be solved in HTTP with multiple attempts at content
> negotiation for each alternative and need not be expressed in the container
> document.
> 
> You outline a very large problem [...]

You are making some very good points, Marc. Content negotiation would
be nice if only it weren't so hopelessly broken. I am not sure what
the best solution is given the current mess.

Marcus
--
Marcus E. Hennecke
marcush@crc.ricoh.com        http://www.crc.ricoh.com/~marcush/

Received on Monday, 15 July 1996 17:25:51 UTC