Mark Anderson wrote:
> Duane Clark wrote:
>
>> Sigh.... In my browsing through bugzilla looking for this (I was looking
>> for "link" rather than "slash") I came across several other cases like
>> this where the solution has been "don't fix because the link is broken".
>> I can understand how that might sound like a tempting solution, but I
>> really believe it is excessively pedantic.
>>
>> In this case it is even worse, because according to the bug report, the
>> behavior exhibited is in fact a deliberate attempt to fix a broken link.
>> If the URL had been typed by hand, the solution implemented might be
>> reasonable. But for a link imbedded in a document, I think I can
>> confidently predict that 95% of the time this is the wrong fix.
>>
>> I would hate to see all these people put an incredible amount of work
>> into Mozilla, and then only the hardcore people use it because it
>> "doesn't work". It really doesn't matter whether the fault is with the
>> web page creators or Mozilla, if Mozilla is the only browser that
>> doesn't work.
>
>
> You mean there are browsers that actually will follow links that only
> have one slash after http:?
Umm... yea. Netscape 4.76. And without having tried it, I will predict
that IE5 does too.
> The fault lies with the authors who wrote
> such obviously wrong URLs. I look at that and think, "The obvious
> intent was to have two slashes", not, "The obvious intent is to go to
> /somedir on the same site."
I disagree. It is virtually certain that they tested those links with
another browser, and obviously they did not use Mozilla. And this will
with virtual certainty apply in 95% of such cases (actually, I think it
very likely that number is more like 99%).
> It's utterly unclear, and wrong in either
> case. The only way to successfully try to work around the invalidity of
> the link would be to pop up a dialog with something along the lines of
> "The link you are trying to follow is not constructed correctly. Do you
> want to attempt to resolve it on this domain or as an absolute URL?"
> with buttons to those effects.
Obviously I disagree. Again, Mozilla already has a fix, and in my opinion
it is the wrong fix.
> (My personal preference would be to break backwards compatibility here.
> One person's pedantic is another person's flat wrong. :) )
The average consumer (and me too) will say it works with NS4.76 or IE5
but not with Mozilla, and therefore Mozilla is broke. For perfectly good
evidence of this, take a look at the bug page at how many times this has
been resubmitted. It is the largest number I have so far stumbled across
(though I have not looked at a lot).
If all these similar cases I came across in bugzilla remain unfixed,
then possibly what will happen is people will repeatedly run in to web
pages that don't work, and may eventually give up and use a browser that
that handles them the way they expect. Over and over I saw on bugzilla
that the solution to a broken web page was for the user to contact the
web administrator and have them fix their broken pages. Yea right.
--
My real email is akamail.com@dclark (or something like that).
