On 14/09/2025 17:02, David Woolley wrote:
Thinking more about it, it may actually be correct to escape the quotes there. It would need some research on the quoting rules, but it wouldn't be possible to use meta to simulate arbitrary HTTP headers, if there wasn't a level of unescaping of quotes, although dropping the quotes entirely may be enough here. I think this is a Lynx bug.
The problem here seems to be that Refresh is a hack introduced by the mainstream browser developers, and W3C, in their dying days of control over web browsers, tried to kill it off. I think it was actually created as the meta element, but the implementations also handled it as a real HTTP header.
The problem with this history is that there is no detailed formal specification. However, HTTP/1.1 generally allows quoted strings as values, so I think the quotes are valid, but they are redundant, as URLs are not allowed to contain linear white space, and it should be ignored, so there is no need to protect them with quotes.
As such, I think Lynx should tolerate quotes, but DDG should avoid using them, in the first place.
Firefox handles the redirect with Refresh and " successfully, when run with scripting off.
Incidentally, the lite version seems to be reserved for IE6. There is an IE type conditional in the html version that redirects to that version. It looks like the lite version uses HTML 3 presentational markup (lots of br's), with no styles and no images.
