274255 - mindspring.com - \ in URIs

Status: RESOLVED WORKSFORME

(Tech Evangelism Graveyard :: English US, defect)

Description

[James]

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

In the page at http://www.mindspring.com/~beaver/tfc/chippics.html , images are
not rendered due to the usage of \ instead of / in the file path. Internet
Explorer will render the images in either case.

Reproducible: Always
Steps to Reproduce:
1.
2.
3.

Comment 1

[Bill Mason]

\ is invalid in a file path, so this is correct.

IE just takes it upon itself to silently fix the error.

Comment 2

[James]

\ is not invalid under Windows operating system. It may be invalid in *nix, but
perfectly valid under Windows.

Comment 3

[James]

Type "c:\" into the navigation toolbar, Firefox will change the address to
"file:///c:/" and browse c: under Windows. Since Firefox can accomplish that, it
should be able to reformat file paths to fit normal url convention.

Comment 4

[Phil Ringnalda (:philor)]

Local filesystem paths are not URIs (until we convert them into a file: URL).
Completely different things with completely different rules. There's no
ambiguity in RFC 2396: \ is an excluded character, which must be escaped as %5C.
If someone really wants to use invalid URLs on their server, they need to be
prepared to have their server convert %5C back to \ before it gets looked up in
their filesystem, because even a browser that ignores the RFC can't guarantee
that there will be nothing between it and the server that knows it received an
invalid URI that should be fixed.