Re: LYNX-DEV HREF pedantry

[Klaus Weide]

On Sat, 13 Sep 1997, Philip Webb wrote:

> i just visited the excellent SSLeay site mentioned in a recent posting
> --  www.psy.uq.edu.au:8080/~ftp/Crypto/  -- , which has a table of contents.
> Lynx 2-7 refuses to goto most of the internal anchors,
> as the words in the quotes are not joined by  _ :
> eg  HREF="#What is new"  rather than  HREF="#What_is_new" ;
> the corresponding  NAME  lines are correct apart from the omitted  _ ;
> Lynx does goto  HREF="#Amiga" .
> the site was created using an automated HTML writer of some kind;
> i have pointed out the problem to them.

Why do you think that the ' ' is really a '_' character?  You are just
guessing.  Lynx happens to guess differently, or treat it differently.

URLs cannot contain unescaped spaces.  "#What is new" is an (invalid) URL
reference.  

I am not even getting into the questions whether a NAME attribute with
spaces is valid HTML and whether an ID attribute with spaces is valid
HTML.

> is there any useful reason -- anything more than blind pedantry --
> why Lynx refuses to insert (understand) the implicit  _  in this case?

Well, since you probably regard the above as pedantry -

This is <A HREF="http://yop.vi.ri.cmu.edu/~todd/ggisource/lib/ggilib 
-dynamic/vendor/IBM/vga_4/visual.c">a link</A>you have a hard time to 
write if your editor or something else restricts you to 80 characters
per line or fewer.

See also <URL: http://www.ics.uci.edu/~fielding/url/draft-fielding
-url-syntax-06.txt> if these examples don't make it obvious enough
why whitespace in URL references should be insignificant.

There really is no excuse why *an automatic tool* should *generate*
IDs with embedded spaces.

Then look into CHANGES.new or FOTEMODS and read the entry under
1997-06-04 :)

   Klaus

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