132213 - Web site does not work properly when URL has colons replaced with %3A encoding

Status: RESOLVED WORKSFORME

(SeaMonkey :: Location Bar, defect)

Description

[Ken Serrine]

From Bugzilla Helper:
User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i686; en-US; rv:0.9.8) Gecko/20020204
BuildID:    2002020415

A web site does not work right from Mozilla.
The web site may be doing their URL wrong, but Netscape handles it fine.
The difference that I see is Mozilla is changing a colon to %3A, which I don't
think the web site handles very well.

Here is the URL as Mozilla shows it:
http://vic.ilsos.net/WebZ/Authorize:sessionid=0:type=als:style=public:next=html/vicnfsearch.html%3Aactive0=3

Here is the URL as Netscape shows it:
http://vic.ilsos.net/WebZ/Authorize:sessionid=0:type=als:style=public:next=html/vicnfsearch.html:active=3



Reproducible: Always
Steps to Reproduce:
1.go to http://www.vic.lib.il.us/
2.Type in a zip code for Public Access (we use 61548)
3.Click on the start button
4.Type in some search criteria (like Terry Brooks)
5.Press Enter or click on the Go
6.You will get a System Failure on their web page, but you should get the results
7.Try the same thing in Netscape (version 4.7 is what I use) and it will work

Actual Results:  The web page comes back with System Failure

Expected Results:  It should have shown the web page with the problem search results

Mozilla may be changing the colon to %3A because that is the proper encoding,
but web sites that have messy URL's would still work if there was an option to
NOT change the colon to %3A.  It doesn't do it to every colon (see the example
URL elsewhere in this bug submission to see what I mean).  Netscape either
correctly handles it or works around the brokeness of the URL format.
I don't know if the Severity should be Normal or Enhancement.

Comment 1

[Andreas Otte]

Hmmm ... the usual : in the filename segment stuff. We encode it to get around
possible problems with the colon as part of filenames when doing resolving of
relative urls (the colon usually indicates a scheme before it as part of an
absolute url). 

As RFC 2396 says the colon and %3A are (and should be) equivalent as part of the
path segment (which the filename is a part of). Strictly spoken the error is on
the server side where they fail to unescape the path.

The only solution on mozilla side to this, that I see, is to drop the encoding
of the colon in the filename, but to add a special encoding-mask (including the
colon) under the assumption of dealing with filenames while navigating a tree or
something similar (resolving relative urls). This places can easily be found
where the filebasename-mask is used to encode. 

Comment 2

[John Levon]

Both urls seem to work for me, trunk Linux.