URL syntax (was: ComCast DNS hijacking)

Ben Scott dragonhawk at gmail.com
Tue Aug 25 19:26:24 EDT 2009


On Tue, Aug 25, 2009 at 7:13 PM, Dan Jenkins<dan at 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



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