281562 - (lensmoor) lensmoor.org - Firefox doesn't put coordinates last in URL resulting from form submission

Status: RESOLVED FIXED

(Tech Evangelism Graveyard :: English US, defect)

Description

[Bryan Hager]

User-Agent:       Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Win98; en-US; rv:1.7.5) Gecko/20041107 Firefox/1.0
Build Identifier: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Win98; en-US; rv:1.7.5) Gecko/20041107 Firefox/1.0

When utilizing the lensmoor.org whois feature, results in an Invalid Input error
message from the site.  Attempted to duplicate the error with several other
browsers.  Netscape 6.2 results in the same failure, however, Netscape 4.75 and
Internet Explorer 6.0 work successfully.  I'm not sure if this is a "standards"
violation on lensmoor.org's part, but considering it works in an older version
of Netscape as well as a more current version of IE, it may not be a standards
issue.

Reproducible: Always

Steps to Reproduce:
1. Open http://lensmoor.org
2. Click the 'whois' option from the frame on the left.
3. Enter the names 'killian,' 'misad,' or any other game character in the whois
box on the right frame, then click the whois icon.

Actual Results:  
'Invalid Input' on the resulting page.  

Please note:  View source works without a problem.  Shows the command '<FORM
method="GET" action="cgi-bin/whois.cgi">' within the body of the source.  This
looks like standard type coding to me, though I'm a VB and HTML developer/coder
(ie; not strong with cgi or asp).

Expected Results:  
Displayed the whois info from the game of the character names submitted.

Comment 1

[Jesse Ruderman]

IE produces URLs like
http://lensmoor.org/cgi-bin/whois.cgi?whois=killian&x=50&y=20
and the server accepts them.

Firefox produces URLs like
http://lensmoor.org/cgi-bin/whois.cgi?x=50&y=20&whois=killian
and the server returns a page saying "Invalid Input" even though the only
difference is the order of the parameters.

Does the HTML standard specify the order of parameters in URLs resulting from
form submissions?  Do any other sites break due to this difference between IE
and Firefox?

Comment 2

[Jesse Ruderman]

To clarify, http://lensmoor.org/cgi-bin/whois.cgi?x=50&y=20&whois=killian is the
URL of the frame after you submit the form in Firefox.  You can see the URL by
right-clicking the frame and selecting "Show only this frame", and you can see
the corresponding URL in IE by right-clicking the page and selecting "Properties".

Comment 3

[Boris Zbarsky [:bzbarsky]]

Jesse, you need to reassign when you change component...

Comment 4

[Boris Zbarsky [:bzbarsky]]

> Does the HTML standard specify the order of parameters in URLs resulting from
> form submissions? 

Yes.  Successful form controls must be sent in document order.  IE does this,
generally.  The issue, I suspect, is that <input type="image"> isn't in
form.elements, so IE sends everything in form.elements in document order, then
sends the <input type="image">....  That's the wrong behavior in this case.

Almost all sites use standard CGI libraries that don't depend on the order of
things in the query string, so very few would be broken by this.

Over to evangelism; the site is just relying on an IE bug.

Comment 5

[Matthias Versen [:Matti]]

Can not find whois on the menu