273371 - "not a registered protocol" if link contains a colon

Status: VERIFIED INVALID

(Firefox :: General, defect)

Description

[mozilla.3.signal11]

User-Agent:       Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i686; en-US; rv:1.7.5) Gecko/20041107 Firefox/1.0
Build Identifier: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i686; en-US; rv:1.7.5) Gecko/20041107 Firefox/1.0

If a link is a plain filename which contains a colon, firefox will issue the
warning: 'xyz is not a registered protocol', where xyz is the part of the link
before the colon. The problem does not occur if the filename is preceded by "./".

Reproducible: Always
Steps to Reproduce:
1. Create a page with the link: <a href="foo:bar.html">Test</a>
2. Load the page and click on the link.
3.

Actual Results:  
A warning popped up saying: foo is not a registered protocol.

Expected Results:  
A plain filename is a valid relative URL conforming to RFC 1808, and thus
Firefox should be able to resolve it to an absolute URL following the procedure
outlined in RFC 1808, and render the corresponding HTML resource. I am not aware
of any specification that requires the presence of a leading "./".

Comment 1

[Jim Davis]

Perhaps it requires encoding the : as %3A?

Comment 2

[Tuukka Tolvanen (sp3000)]

rfc 2396 updates rfc 1808. Section 5, Relative URI References, allows only
unreserved, escaped, and ;@&=+$, characters; it also makes special note of this
issue:
   Authors should be aware that a path segment which contains a colon
   character cannot be used as the first segment of a relative URI path
   (e.g., "this:that"), because it would be mistaken for a scheme name.

   It is therefore necessary to precede such segments with other
   segments (e.g., "./this:that") in order for them to be referenced as
   a relative path.