Backslashes in URLs

• From: Paul Gilmartin <PaulGBoulder@aim.com>
• Date: Thu, 17 Feb 2011 00:56:06 -0700
• To: www-validator@w3.org
• Message-Id: <56DEB60D-6B0C-4A6A-A1EC-013F44D29446@aim.com>

Hello, Validator,

NOTE: Whenever possible, give the address of the document you were checking.

    http://www.hlasm.com/english/opl_cobm.htm

contains numerous links with backslashes in URLs, such as:

    http://www.hlasm.com/english/opcd\A.htm

(although the author may be in the process of fixing them).

RFC 1738 says backslashes are unsafe and must be escaped:

    http://freesoft.org/CIE/RFC/1738/4.htm

w3's HTML validation fails to report this RFC violation.  It should
because browser treatment of this invalid usage is inconsistent:
MSIE treats '\' as if it were '/'; Firefox simply passes it on as '\',
and the w3's own link validator encodes it as '%5C'.

Thanks,
gil

Received on Thursday, 17 February 2011 07:57:43 UTC