Re: LYNX-DEV HREF pedantry

[Philip Webb]

970914 Klaus Weide wrote:
> 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  _ :
> Why do you think that the ' ' is really a '_' character?  You are just
> guessing.  Lynx happens to guess differently, or treat it differently.

not at all:
 _  is -- as usual in names of files, links etc -- a place-filler for a space,
so Lynx should supply  _  in this case where there is no ambiguity. 
 
> URLs cannot contain unescaped spaces.

why "cannot"?  they obviously do in this case,
& many others if HTML automata behave like this one.
 
> 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.

`valid' is the critical word here: 
Lynx users -- unlike some developers, perhaps -- live in a real World
where HTML is written by commercial software & read by commercial browsers;
they do not have the time to write e-rebukes to site managers
to ask them politely to rectify their strictly invalid HTML
(as i have done in this case, without reply so far).
like it or not -- & i don't really like it -- ,
Lynx has to try to make sense of what is out there.
 
> > 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

yes, it sounds exactly like what i meant by pedantry
(professionally, not personally: big smile).
suppose you write me a letter from the US (i believe)
& i return it without having read it,
complaining that i cannot understand your words `neighbor' & `theater',
pointing out that they are not in the OED
& any properly educated person who knows English etymology would not use them
(i deliberately avoid `labor' or `defense', which are good Latin).
your reaction to me would be pretty close to my reaction to you re Lynx.
 
> 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.

so what?  it contains a carriage-return, not a space:
Lynx is quite capable of distinguishing between the two.
my question is why -- apart from blind pedantry -- Lynx does not replace
a space found within quotes following  HREF=  or  NAME=  with  _ ,
there being no apparent possibility of confusion or error resulting.
 
> There really is no excuse why *an automatic tool* should *generate* IDs
> with embedded spaces.

there's no excuse why a lot of things out in the real World,
but they go on happening & we all have to find ways to handle them,
if we cannot realistically hope to alter them.
 
> look into CHANGES.new or FOTEMODS and read the entry under 1997-06-04

yup, i see your e-smile; yup, i looked:

1997-06-04
* Mods in LYLegitimizeHREF() of LYCharUtils.c for dealing more effectively
  with fragments which have illegal characters, as is becoming common due
  to authoring tools such as MicroSoft's Frontpage and Netscape's HTML
  editor.  The actual URL-reference is still handled so as to yield a
  fully legitimate absolute URL, without any unescaped spaces, but the
  fragment is checked only for problem characters such as tab or newline,
  and otherwise is unmodified.  (Try the vanilla versus modified code with
  the http://www.cnib.org/library/ww_flw96.htm atrocity, brought to you
  discourtesy of Frontpage. :) - FM

thanks for informing me, but:
this is rather vague & wouldn't tell me exactly what Lynx-ac99 does;
& i'm getting rather tired of the interminable series of development versions,
which more than one lynx-dever has complained s/he has difficulty downloading
& successfully patching.

there's lots of goodies inside: when can we -- please -- have a new version?
2-8 by now, surely: it would be a genuine tribute to all the volunteer work
KW FM LE ET AL have been putting in (well, Fote isn't working ... ).

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