Bug#172132: pkgreport.cgi doesn't cope with & where & is expected
In message <[🔎] 20021207195649.GA23380@cibalia.gkvk.hr> you wrote:
> On Sat, Dec 07, 2002 at 03:37:56PM +0000, Darren Salt wrote:
>> Arguably, pkgreport.cgi etc. not coping with & where & is expected is
>> correct behaviour, but there are one or two browsers which don't decode
>> character entities in URLs (in the case of at least one such browser, it
>> was a design decision based on & in URLs often being a literal & rather
>> than marking the start of a character entity).
>> Better to be liberal in what you accept :-)
> Funny you should say that, in light of...
> X-Message-Flag: Outlook Express is broken. Upgrade to mail(1).
> IMHO this is not a bug, it's a request for supporting broken browsers.
Any browser which displays
<a href="index.html>Home page</a>
as a link, containing the text "Home page", to index.html is supporting
broken HTML; should it simply fail to display it?
Or perhaps a broken RISC OS port of mkisofs which doesn't translate '/' to
'.' - should Linux isofs (which is trivially patchable to work around this)
just not find files whose names (brokenly) contain '/'?
As it happens, there's a version of Browse which correctly handles URLs in
links; a few people have beta-test copies. It just never got released because
the rights to it, RISC OS and some other things were bought by Pace, and
they're a *lot* more paranoid about releasing software than Acorn were...
... and I do recognise that there are people who'll continue to use Outhouse
Express because it happens to do things conveniently for them; just as I
continue to use Browse. But that won't stop me from saying "don't use OE"...
I suppose that the main (relevant) difference is that OE can inconvenience
many people, whereas Browse can inconvenience only its user ;-)
--
| Darren Salt | nr. Ashington, | d youmustbejoking,demon,co,uk
| RPC, Spec+3, A3010 | Northumberland | s zap,tartarus,org
| BBC M128, Linux PC | Toon Army | @
| Retrocomputing: a PC card in a Risc PC
She sells cshs by the cshore.
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