Re: Questions about URLs for Gopher search items
On Tue, Oct 29, 2019 at 09:24:01AM -0700, Peter wrote:
> Personally, I think we should NOT use a ? as a separator between the selector and the search string. The Gopher spec is pretty clear that you can put almost any kind of character into the selector, question marks included.
Ah, that's a good point: RFC 4266 could not possibly had codified the
practice established by early web browsers of using ?, because this
would contradict RFC 1436 which does indeed permit ? in a selector. So,
no slack for Lynx after all! :)
> Consider: gopher://example.com/7myselector?continued%09search%20and%20more_search
>
> The split should happen at the %09, not the ?
Certainly agreed.
For client authors who believe in following Postel's law, it seems your
client should only ever produce URLs itself which use %09 to seprate
queries, but if a user inputs a type 7 URL which includes a ? and not a
%09 then you should assume your user is following a link which was
shared by a Lynx user and treat the ? as a %09. As a corollary to this,
developers of search engines should refrain from giving search points
selectors with ? in them, even though they're perfectly within their
rights to do so by RFC 1436.
Cheers,
Solderpunk
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