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Bug#172132: pkgreport.cgi doesn't cope with & where & is expected



On Sat, Dec 07, 2002 at 09:17:00PM +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?

Uhh, I don't see how that is relevant to what we have here. It's not broken
to use &amp; to represent the ampersand character in anchor tags; on the
contrary, it is exactly according to the specification. If the browser says
it supports HTML x.y, then it should implement the HTML x.y spec. The extra
stuff that handles user fuckups is a nice bonus, but it comes second.

It's unfortunate that there are browsers that do things otherwise. But that
still doesn't mean our spec-abiding (law-abiding, peace-loving :) software
has a _bug_ if it doesn't handle such quirks. That would be a nice bonus,
but it comes second to handling the normal stuff.

-- 
     2. That which causes joy or happiness.



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