276902 - When an HTML link in an A tag has apostrophes in it instead of single quotes, Firefox tries to add it to the URL to view.

Status: RESOLVED WONTFIX

(Core :: DOM: HTML Parser, enhancement)

Description

[OrionBlastar]

User-Agent:       Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US; rv:1.7.5) Gecko/20041107 Firefox/1.0 StumbleUpon/1.999
Build Identifier: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US; rv:1.7.5) Gecko/20041107 Firefox/1.0 StumbleUpon/1.999

Mozilla and Firefox break when trying to click on a link that has "`"
apostrophes in them instead of a single quote "'".

For example:

<a href=`vip.php`>VIP Center</a>

Under other browsers the link would go to:

vip.php

under Firefox it goes to:

%60vip.php%60

Then a document not found, 404 error happens.

Many web designers are using this method to try and break Mozilla and Firefox to
force users to use Internet Explorer for certain areas of their web sites.
Rather than use single quotes instead of apostrophes, they tell the user to use
IE instead of Firefox or Mozilla.

I hope this can be fixed, as it is really annoying.

Reproducible: Always

Steps to Reproduce:
1. View a web site that uses aposthropes instead of single quotes in its A tag
like so <a href=`index.html`>Home</a>
2. Click on that link.
3. View the URL as %60index.html%60 with a 404 File not found error.

Actual Results:  
I got the 404 error, file not found.

Expected Results:  
Treated the "`" apostrophe characters as single quotes when used in this manner
by malicious web masters.

Internet Explorer seems to see "`" as single quotes when viewing the same web
page like in <a href=`index.html`> as index.html and not %60index.html%60 in the
displayed URL that is browsed.

Comment 1

[Uri Bernstein]

This is an RFE (and will probably end up as WONTFIX).

Comment 2

[Blake Kaplan (:mrbkap) (inactive)]

Yeah, this is WONTFIX.

Comment 3

[Blake Kaplan (:mrbkap) (inactive)]

jst, bz said I should run this by you too. Is this worth fixing (please reopen
if you think so)?

Comment 4

[Johnny Stenback (:jst)]

Show me a non-trivial number of sites that rely on this and I'll re-think, but
for now I agree, this is WONTFIX.