Site mangles a URL

ban-all-sheds · 22 Jun 2011

Copied from the address bar, and pasted in:

http://uk.rs-online.com/web/search/...ultiselectParam=4294767501&selectSubRange=Key Switches#breadCrumb

ALL of it should be the URL, not just up to the word "Key".....

Monkeh · 22 Jun 2011

ban-all-sheds said:
Copied from the address bar, and pasted in:

http://uk.rs-online.com/web/search/...ultiselectParam=4294767501&selectSubRange=Key Switches#breadCrumb

ALL of it should be the URL, not just up to the word "Key".....

How do you expect it to know that?

You can do this:
http://uk.rs-online.com/web/search/...767501&selectSubRange=Key Switches#breadCrumb

DIYnot · 23 Jun 2011

Monkeh is quite right, you cannot (or should not) have spaces in URLs.

Spaces should be replaced with %20, and normally the browser would do this anyway if not visibly (Chrome) then behind the scenes (Firefox).

ban-all-sheds · 23 Jun 2011

Chrome is unbelievably sh**e at granularity of privacy controls.

Firefox does not work with this site's BBCode buttons.

And now IE8 isn't rendering URLs properly.

I'd like to get all these f***wit developers in a room and force them to bite each others genitals off.

ban-all-sheds · 23 Jun 2011

Monkeh said:
How do you expect it to know that?

My bad - obviously it would stop at the space - I meant to show that it didn't work even when wrapped in [url] [/url] tags.

http://uk.rs-online.com/web/search/...767501&selectSubRange=Key Switches#breadCrumb

Monkeh · 23 Jun 2011

Because it's not a valid URL the space character must be encoded.

The website which gave you that URL, and the browser which copied it without fixing the encoding, are broken, not the forum.

ban-all-sheds · 23 Jun 2011

OTOH, they work fine, and this site doesn't.

I hear what you're saying, but at what point does deliberately refusing to accept something non-standard become obstructive pedantry?

FYI - with the space both IE8 and FF4.0.1 handle the URL just fine when pasted into the address bar.

If I repeat, using FF, the steps which I originally took using IE on the RS site to arrive at that page of results, I get the same URL with a space in it displayed in the address bar.

Yes - copying it from there does indeed get me 'Key%20Switches#breadCrumb' at the end, not 'Key Switches#breadCrumb', but the point is that neither browser barfs.

The RS site is generating non-compliant URLs.

IE and FF get over it.

This site does not.

Is that the best way to deal with non-standard constructs, or is it obstructive pedantry?

Monkeh · 24 Jun 2011

Firefox and IE8 are designed for users who don't know to encode such characters, so they do it for you.

The forum is not designed to mangle your input.

Allowing non-compliance leads to greater, more widespread non-compliance. You either comply with a standard or you do not.

ban-all-sheds · 24 Jun 2011

At what point does deliberately refusing to accept something non-standard become obstructive pedantry?

Monkeh · 24 Jun 2011

ban-all-sheds said:
At what point does deliberately refusing to accept something non-standard become obstructive pedantry?

At what point does allowing people to blatantly ignore standards become acceptable?

ban-all-sheds · 24 Jun 2011

To reverse that, in a way, at what point does penalising breaches of standards that do no harm become unacceptable?

I've got experience of this sort of thing from both sides - I once spent several frustrating weeks porting source code from a system with a lax compiler to one with one which rigorously stuck to the ANSI/FIPS standard.

Would my life have been easier had the original programmers not been allowed to write non-compliant code?

Yes.

Would my life have been easier if the compiler on the target system had been as lax as the one on the source?

Yes.

Did the non-compliant code work?

Yes.

So you have to ask, as I do, just what is the merit in insisting on standards adherence in situations where breaches do no harm?

As I observed, IE is happy with the URL with a space in.

Firefox is happy with the URL with a space in.

If you have Chrome, or Opera, or any other browsers available, I'd be interested to know what they make of it.

And I'd also be interested to know what non-pedantic reason there is for this site's forum software to not allow a URL with a space in it, when bracketed with [URL] tags to negate the parsing issue, to work.