RE: lynx-dev Conversion of special character codes within anchor tags

[Dave Eaton]

On Thu, 24 Sep 1998, Bruno Prior wrote:

> Perhaps you could point me to the standard where this has been clarified?
> 
> I can give you plenty of examples where this behaviour causes problems. At
> the very least, it introduces unnecessary processing requirements. I guess
> I'll have to do as you say and escape all my ampersands, but can you give me
> one example of when it would be useful and valid to include non-ASCII
> characters in a URL?

My reading of the W3C's definition of URI syntax
    http://www.w3.org/Addressing/URL/uri-spec.html
and the URL spec
    http://www.w3.org/Addressing/URL/url-spec.html
seems to put "&" in the "safe" category ... and does not mention character
entities, but does say "Spaces and control characters in URLs must be
escaped for transmission in HTTP, as must other disallowed characters."
The spec defines "escape" as "% hex hex".

It appears to me Bruno's point that Lynx should not try to interpret the
"&" as special is the correct position and that Lynx's code should be
looked at again.

 Dave Eaton
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