[Mediawiki-l] "|" in a url is valid

Mon Aug 15 16:43:24 UTC 2005

the more bothering was point 1: depending where you put the "|" the
outcome is different.

for point 2:
[] has a clear meaning when something begins and ends. i think it is
unclean to let it break by |,  no matter if it is in the spec or not.
and in the mediawiki doc it says that a blank space is between the
link and the label. and, after more than 2 million articles change
from [] to [[]] ... just to save one line in the documentation ... i
do not know if you are really meaning what you are saying.

-solo.

On 8/12/05, Brion Vibber <brion at pobox.com> wrote:
> solo turn wrote:
> > 2. the "|" in the url confuses the parser
> 
> Please note that "|" is, so far as I can tell, not allowed in URLs.
> 
> http://www.faqs.org/rfcs/rfc2396.html
> 
> 2.4.3. Excluded US-ASCII Characters
> 
>     Although they are disallowed within the URI syntax, we include here a
>     description of those US-ASCII characters that have been excluded and
>     the reasons for their exclusion.
> 
> [snip]
> 
>     Other characters are excluded because gateways and other transport
>     agents are known to sometimes modify such characters, or they are
>     used as delimiters.
> 
>     unwise      = "{" | "}" | "|" | "\" | "^" | "[" | "]" | "`"
> 
>     Data corresponding to excluded characters must be escaped in order to
>     be properly represented within a URI.
> 
> 
> RFC 2396 has been superseded by RFC 3986 which removes this informative
> list of excluded characters, but from my reading it continues to not
> include "|" in the allowed set, so it remains forbidden.
> 
> Since "|" is a) disallowed in all URIs by the spec, and b) a special
> syntax character used in MediaWiki's linking syntax, it would be very
> unwise IMHO to allow it in links. That would for instance break the
> ability to move to [[http://example.com/|Some web site]] form for
> consistency between web and wiki links in the future.
> 
> -- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)
> 
> 
> _______________________________________________
> MediaWiki-l mailing list
> MediaWiki-l at Wikimedia.org
> http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/mediawiki-l
> 
> 
> 
>