264846 - Convert Ampersand (&) to & in the location textbox

Status: RESOLVED WONTFIX

(SeaMonkey :: Location Bar, enhancement)

Description

[Brian 'netdragon' Bober]

XHTML requires that all special characters be properly escaped, even within Uthe
href attribute... That means and URL such as
http://some.fake.site/blah.cgi?a=1&b=1 should be written in XHTML as
http://some.fake.site/blah.cgi?a=1&b=1

That creates a big pain in the butt when you are copying URLS from the location
bar to a document you are writing. It'd be great if Mozilla showed them in the
location bar already escaped.

Comment 1

[Michiel van Leeuwen (email: mvl+moz@)]

But i will make mozilla show the wrong url in the urlbar, and cause great pain
if pasting into something else, like a mail message, a text editor, a shell etc.

Comment 2

[Brian 'netdragon' Bober]

Shouldn't the applications that would use the URL properly escape the ampersand?
That being said, I'm sure some don't. It's so stupid that XML expects the URLs
escaped within quotes.

Could there perhaps be some mechanism like "expand URL" or something?

Comment 3

[Boris Zbarsky [:bzbarsky]]

> Shouldn't the applications that would use the URL properly escape the
> ampersand?

Only if they're parsing XML/HTML.  In most cases they are not.

This is wontfix.

Comment 4

[Michiel van Leeuwen (email: mvl+moz@)]

*** Bug 272133 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***

Comment 5

[Jon Dowland]

Hi -

first apologies for my dupe bug. This bug doesn't turn up when searching for
'url escaping' or the like.

The URL can be copied into the clipboard in a variety of different ways. Should
the treatment of copying the URL from the location bar be different from that of
'Copy Link Location'?

I note that if you right-click on an email address you are offered to 'Copy
Email Address', which strips out the mailto: bit, in addition to 'Copy Link
Location'. 

Could a similar provision not be made for web-URLs? Surely the existence of this
email link suggests that this bug should not be WONTFIX?