Re: Browsers that *don't* support about:blank
Tom wrote:
How come y'all are being adversarial? I agree with the maintainer.
I'm just curious what browsers support it :-) Jeez, grandstanding....
Sorry if I came off as adversarial. Neither lynx nor w3m support
about:blank. Neither does wget, LWP::UserAgent or any of the Java user
agents I've thrown it at. Python doesn't seem to support it either.
Simply put, its not a valid url. Any language suited for doing HTTP
would have to be patched/modified to deal with it. The more things you
think of, the more clearly it is that the 'big' gui browsers use it as a
hack to get to a blank startup page.
You know there are such things as "defacto" standards as well as
"dejure" standards. It is my contention that many browser authors have
found it useful to include "about:blank" primarily as a way of saying
"no start page." If it's not a standard, how come everybody's doing it?
Links is doing that. If you start it without any arguments, you get a
blank page. Thus the 'defacto' standard of a blank start page is
preserved without an explicit tag. There's also a concept of
'interpretation'. :)
The Romans couldn't think of the concept of zero, and thus doing long
division in Roman Numerals sucked. :-)
They not only couldn't concieve of zero, the very concept was
discouraged. There's a cute book called the History of Zero (or
something very close to that), you should read it, its fun.
Did you know that in SQL the truth value of NULL = NULL is NULL. And
the group by statement groups together things whose equality truth value
is TRUE. Except it groups together NULLs :-)
People have trouble of thinking of things that aren't there. :)
Fair enough. However, the maintainer never said no. They said to show
them a standard. So write an rfc. The thing to remmeber is that any
changes the debian maintainer makes to links will need to be preserved
from that point forward. Therefore it is in their best interrest to only
make the minimum changes needed to make moving changes upstream into
debain less painful. Perhaps they feel that supporting about:blank will
not make it into upstream and will thus be a burden to support moving
forward. Remember, debian supports multiple architectures and branches.
Now, if there were a standard the likelyhood of about:blank being
supported upstream would increase. So would the likelyhood of a patch to
add such behavior being accepted. So really, you could take 2 aproaches.
Write a standard, or ask upstream.
My original question of 'what value does it provide' still stands. I
can't think of a use that only about:blank can solve. In fact, I think
the use of about:blank in the case you mention causes more problems than
it solves.
--
Mental (Mental@NeverLight.com)
"The Torah... The Gospels... The Koran...
Each claimed as the infallible word of GOD.
Misquoted, misinterpreted, misunderstood, and misapplied.
Maybe that's why he doesn't do any more interviews." - sinfest.com
CARPE NOCTEM, QUAM MINIMUM CREDULA POSTERO.
GPG public key: http://www.neverlight.com/pas/Mental.asc
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