Re: URL syntax
Ben Scott wrote: On Tue, Aug 25, 2009 at 7:48 PM, Dan Jenkinsd...@rastech.com wrote: Does the URL show properly in Thunderbird but then get messed up when Firefox gets it? Yes. If I recollect, it looked right in Thunderbird, but opening it caused a failure in Firefox. Curiouser and curiouser. If I copy-and-paste the URL to a text editor, confirm the ampersand, then CP back to Firefox, it works properly. If I manually type an ampersand as a Wikipedia URL, I get the appropriate redirect. So Firefox does the right thing for me. Maybe it's the interaction between FF and TB? I've deleted the email, so I cannot do any further testing. If you want to do more testing, the URL was: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fast_Search__Transfer If you don't want to do more testing, that's okay, too. =-) This URL worked fine for me. No idea why it came through broke the first time. If I recollect it was not the encoding which was broke, but that there was a break in the URL. When I searched for the partial URL on Wikipedia, I found the right URL, which, when I posted it in my email, encoded the as %26. This is purely from memory, during a very busy day, whilst concentrating on something else, so my memory may have no resemblance to reality. :-D -- Dan Jenkins, Rastech Inc., 1-603-206-9951 ___ gnhlug-discuss mailing list gnhlug-discuss@mail.gnhlug.org http://mail.gnhlug.org/mailman/listinfo/gnhlug-discuss/
URL syntax (was: ComCast DNS hijacking)
On Tue, Aug 25, 2009 at 1:36 PM, Michael ODonnell
michael.odonn...@comcast.net wrote:
I definitely transmitted a literal ampersand in the URL in the
original message ...
That's what Gmail shows me, too, even with Show original. Gmail
can be a bit funky, but I think it's telling the truth in this case.
(cut'n'pasted right out of Firefox's address bar)
Be aware that for some browsers (including Firefox), what you see in
the address bar may not be the URL as the protocol processes it.
Firefox will show you the decoded result (complete with characters not
allowed), but send the encoded version, and if you copy to clipboard,
you get the encoded version. This is generally what you want, but it
occasionally leads to confusion. Since you clipboarded it anyway,
this shouldn't be one of those times.
... no MIME encoding or anything like that was involved.
FWIW, the %00 notation is not something MIME knows about. AFAIK, it
was invented for WWW, and is just called URL encoding.
Is it bad form to use literal ampersands in emailed URLs?
I wanted to say that ampersands are reserved in URLs, but I just
checked, and official sources seem to say they are allowed.
The original Mar 1994 URL specification calls ampersand safe, and
does not place it in the reserved character list.
http://www.w3.org/Addressing/URL/url-spec.txt
RFC-1738 (Dec 1994) says ampersand *may* be reserved in some
schemes, but specifically allows it in HTTP host paths.
http://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc1738
RFC-3986 (Jan 2005) says host paths consists of segments, and
segments consist of pchar's, and pchar's include sub-delimiters, and
an ampersand is a sub-delimiter. It also states that the semantics of
query parameters are outside of the scope of the URI spec, beyond the
use of question-mark (?) to separate the query from the path. It even
specifically mentions that the equals sign, as with field=value, is
not part of that spec. http://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc3986
The ampersand/equals syntax used in HTML forms submitted via GET
appear to be defined by the HTML specification, as
application/x-www-form-urlencoded. It's not mentioned anywhere else
that I can find.
http://www.w3.org/TR/html401/interact/forms.html#h-17.13.4
So all that suggests that an ampersand is perfectly legal in a URL.
So I guess the failure is in software at Dan's end.
It may be worth noting that ampersand is reserved in
{SG,HT,X,XHT}ML, so you can't put a URL containing an ampersand in an
HTML document literally; you have to encode the ampersand as an *ML
character entity (amp;).
In general, I suggest avoiding everything but letters, numbers,
dashes, periods, and underscores in URL path components, for just this
sort of reason.
-- Ben
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Re: URL syntax (was: ComCast DNS hijacking)
On Tue, Aug 25, 2009 at 7:13 PM, Dan Jenkinsd...@rastech.com wrote: So I guess the failure is in software at Dan's end. Which is Thunderbird 2.0.0.22 and Firefox 3.5.2. Odd behavior, as I've never seen it before. But then, I've never seen an ampersand in a URL that wasn't encoded. Does the URL show properly in Thunderbird but then get messed up when Firefox gets it? Or is Thunderbird not recognizing the URL properly when it sees it? You might be able to figure out which one is confused by looking for a copy URL option in Thunderbird, and pasting to a text editor. Likewise, if you have URL with ampersand in it in the text editor, and copy-and-paste to Firebird, does that work? Actually, thinking about it, the ampersand really shouldn't be causing trouble *anyway*, since they show up all the time in URLs which are CGI requests. I suppose if something is looking for the question-mark that indicates a CGI query in order to parse fields it could cause trouble, but WTF would a mail client be doing that for? Maybe Thunderbird uses an HTML display widget, and is wrapping plain text in HTML to display plain text, and didn't escape the ampersand in the URL in the HTML? (Again, ampersands may be legal literals in a URL, but they're reserved in HTML, so URLs using ampersands which appear in HTML must escape/encode the ampersands.) -- Ben ___ gnhlug-discuss mailing list gnhlug-discuss@mail.gnhlug.org http://mail.gnhlug.org/mailman/listinfo/gnhlug-discuss/
Re: URL syntax
Ben Scott wrote: On Tue, Aug 25, 2009 at 7:13 PM, Dan Jenkinsd...@rastech.com wrote: So I guess the failure is in software at Dan's end. Which is Thunderbird 2.0.0.22 and Firefox 3.5.2. Odd behavior, as I've never seen it before. But then, I've never seen an ampersand in a URL that wasn't encoded. Does the URL show properly in Thunderbird but then get messed up when Firefox gets it? Yes. If I recollect, it looked right in Thunderbird, but opening it caused a failure in Firefox. I've deleted the email, so I cannot do any further testing. ___ gnhlug-discuss mailing list gnhlug-discuss@mail.gnhlug.org http://mail.gnhlug.org/mailman/listinfo/gnhlug-discuss/
Re: URL syntax
On Tue, Aug 25, 2009 at 7:48 PM, Dan Jenkinsd...@rastech.com wrote: Does the URL show properly in Thunderbird but then get messed up when Firefox gets it? Yes. If I recollect, it looked right in Thunderbird, but opening it caused a failure in Firefox. Curiouser and curiouser. If I copy-and-paste the URL to a text editor, confirm the ampersand, then CP back to Firefox, it works properly. If I manually type an ampersand as a Wikipedia URL, I get the appropriate redirect. So Firefox does the right thing for me. Maybe it's the interaction between FF and TB? I've deleted the email, so I cannot do any further testing. If you want to do more testing, the URL was: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fast_Search__Transfer If you don't want to do more testing, that's okay, too. =-) -- Ben ___ gnhlug-discuss mailing list gnhlug-discuss@mail.gnhlug.org http://mail.gnhlug.org/mailman/listinfo/gnhlug-discuss/
