[gatein-dev] Potential impacts on URL encoding
Hello,
One of our customer is asking again for w3c validation.
We are studying points where gatein is not w3c compliant.
I think one of most dangerous is about "&" in URLs, according with w3c
documentation:
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Ampersands (&'s) in URLs
Another common error occurs when including a URL which contains an ampersand
("&"):
<!-- This is invalid! --> <a
href="foo.cgi?chapter=1§ion=2©=3&lang=en">...</a>
This example generates an error for "unknown entity section" because the
"&" is assumed to begin an entity reference. Browsers often recover safely
from this kind of error, but real problems do occur in some cases. In this example, many
browsers correctly convert ©=3 to ©=3, which may cause the link to fail. Since
⟨ is the HTML entity for the left-pointing angle bracket, some browsers also
convert &lang=en to 〈=en. And one old browser even finds the entity §,
converting §ion=2 to §ion=2.
To avoid problems with both validators and browsers, always use & in place of
& when writing URLs in HTML:
<a
href="foo.cgi?chapter=1&section=2&copy=3&lang=en">...</a>
Note that replacing & with & is only done when writing the URL in HTML, where
"&" is a special character (along with "<" and
">"). When writing the same URL in a plain text email message or in the
location bar of your browser, you would use "&" and not
"&". With HTML, the browser translates "&" to
"&" so the Web server would only see "&" and not
"&" in the query string of the request.
--------------------------
We did some experiments in the past to code "&" per "&"
but this has negative effect into other components (i.e. WSRP).
Before to start making PoC about it, I would like to ask if someone also tried a similar
approach and we can share our experiences about that.
Thanks,
Lucas