[arachne] Re: Spaces in URLs

Arachne at FreeLists---The Arachne Fan Club!

Jason & Ornumar Dodd jasorn@xxxxxxxxx @ Sunday, April 22, 2007 6:06:54 PM:


> Well, I wouldn't be against the leading or trailing spaces being 
> removed.  Then again I have a hard time understanding those spec type 
> things anyway.   Matt doesn't seem to have that problem :)
> Actually, I don't like embedded spaces either.  I'm an underline guy.

For better or for worse, I've practically memorized the HTTP specs...
That tends to help understanding them... ;)

> I only chimed in because I didn't understand what the problem was in the 
> first place.  I'm still not clear of the answer.  So, is the reason this 
> now works that the website itself changed the url it was pointing to?

The original problem was that the website owner made a typo. And, according
to the HTML specs, both Arachne and everything else was doing "The Right
Thing", even though they were doing different things. (Short story, they put
a space where they ought not. The spec says a browser MAY ignore that space.)

Glenn made a fix that I don't disagree with, in principle, but it will break
some sites (especially dynamically generated, e.g. PHP with pathinfo, CMS
sites, etc.).


I personally don't like sites which have URLs which "look" different than
they really are. The only reason I chimed in is that I recently had an
issue with path elements containing trailing spaces. They are, quite
unfortunately, perfectly legal. You aren't likely to find them often, but
it's better to get a proper fix now than to figure out just why a certain
site causes Arachne to puke in the future.

Anyhow, it looks like everything is perfectly resolved in the current code,
so I'll go back to lurking now. (And eagerly awaiting a release with this
code in it!) ;)

--Matt
                  Arachne at FreeLists                  
-- Arachne, The Premier GPL Web Browser/Suite for DOS --

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