[Zope3-dev] Opera url parameter troubles

[Casey Duncan]

On Monday 18 February 2002 02:31 am, Chris Withers allegedly wrote:
> Fred Drake wrote:
> > On Sat, 16 Feb 2002 17:36:15 -0600 (CST)
> >
> >  sean.bowman@acm.org wrote:
> > > POST /RolePermissionsManagement;view/action/ HTTP/1.1
> >
> > Until recently, Python's urlparse module got it wrong too.
> > Using parameterization on path segments other than the last
> > is probably poorly supported in general, simply because it
> > hasn't been used a lot, so browser support for it has been
> > poorly tested.
> >
> > It doesn't help that the RFCs have changed over time, which
> > only serves to complicate implementations.
>
> To me, this reads as "this is bad, we shouldn't be generating URLs that
> have parameters in anything but the last section"
>
> What do other people think and how do we get around it?

We discussed this at some length during the sprint before the conference. The 
problem is that if you can only supply parameters at the end of the URI, then 
a relative link will strip those parameters off, changing the view 
inadvertently.

So the solution was to move the parameters up to that they would not get 
stripped off as in:

http://foo/barView;view/spam/eggs

Since ppl are gonna want to use relative URLs, this was the best solution we 
could come up with that didn't involve cookies or session tracking.

It's ironic that this would not be supported by browsers, since I thought the 
whole point was to let you specify parameters anywhere in the URI, instead of 
just off the end like with CGI variable assignments.  Its also ironic that 
adhering to "standards" like this causes problems, that could probably be 
solved by coming up with our own, non-standard encoding scheme.

I agree that catering to browsers is bad(tm), but so is alienating users (who 
tend to be pretty religious about browsers). Then again, if we follow the 
standard and some browser doesn't conform, and thereby doesn't work, I don't 
feel too much pity 8^).

/---------------------------------------------------\
  Casey Duncan, Sr. Web Developer
  National Legal Aid and Defender Association
  c.duncan@nlada.org
\---------------------------------------------------/