[Zope3-dev] Opera url parameter troubles

[Fred Drake]

On Mon, 18 Feb 2002 07:31:11 +0000
 Chris Withers <chrisw@nipltd.com> wrote:
> To me, this reads as "this is bad, we shouldn't be
> generating URLs that have
> parameters in anything but the last section"

That's not quite my meaning, but not an unreasonable
extrapolation.

The problem with it that I see is that by relying on
"proper" handling of parameterization of arbitrary path
segments, we're potentially excluding users with either
older browsers (which may conform perfectly well to the
less-clearly written older RFCs), or browsers that try to
conform to the latest RFCs but which have bugs.  There
really hasn't been enough experience with path segment
parameterization to shake out bugs in the implementations
that are actively being used.

It also doesn't help that people who do run into these
problems don't actively report non-conformance to
implementors; I just found out about a thread on a mailing
list I'd never heard of where the Python urlparse module got
slammed badly for non-support of this, but the people
complaining had not filed a bug report (Jim Fulton finally
filed the report).  When I informed them that the bug had
been fixed, there was great jubilation.  ;-)

So I think the bugs will be fixed fairly rapidly in browsers
like Opera if we can test with them and report bugs.  Opera,
in particular, makes great claims of conformance, so I'd
expect them to be fairly responsive to fixing problems.
Have you filed a bug report with them?


  -Fred

-- 
Fred L. Drake, Jr.  <fdrake at acm.org>
PythonLabs at Zope Corporation