Last modified: 2011-03-13 18:06:07 UTC
Existing description and conversation at [[Wikipedia:Wikipedia:Village pump (technical)#Shortcut string bug]]. Copied from there. Firefox lets you make a shortcut string (like "wp") search Wikipedia and other sites. However, it turns '/' into "%2F". Wikipedia doesn't handle that correctly like it does when Firefox replaces ':' with a similar sequence. Is this fixable or do we have to wait for a MediaWiki update? -[[User:Will Pittenger|Will Pittenger]] 06:11, 12 December 2006 (UTC) :In namespaces with subpages disabled, '%2F' should probably be accepted as an alias for '/'. You could [[Mediazilla:|open a bug report]] if you like. —[[User:Simetrical|Simetrical]] ([[User talk:Simetrical|talk]] • [[Special:Contributions/Simetrical|contribs]]) 01:53, 13 December 2006 (UTC)
I guess for sanity it might be best to do this for *all* pages, in fact. Or none. Does anyone have an opinion? It would seem to be the standards-y thing to do. Harder to read, of course, but it doesn't need to be more than an alias. The main issue would of course be if anyone was clever enough to make a page already with a literal "%2F" in it, but that seems to give an outright 404 (see URL). Would this just require a preprocessing variable modification in index.php, or would that be ugly? We don't really need links, etc. to normalize this way, we just have to make sure they can't contain the string literally (which it doesn't look like they can right now). Input URLs are the only things that could usefully work this way.
I have to disagree with the "enhancement" label. The problem interfers with the basic functionality.
No, it does not. Basic functionality does not include correct interfacing with every conceivable third-party program, or even every popular third-party program. If Firefox isn't flexible enough to handle MediaWiki's format, then it would be *good* for us to adjust MediaWiki to better interface with Firefox, but it's not a *bug* if we don't. Bugs are only present when unintended behavior occurs; when intended but undesirable behavior occurs, that's an enhancement request.
Meh, it's a moot point, to be honest; I'd class it as a minor bug. Each has his own priorities. :)
This is actually a low-level issue with Apache; it seems rather unhappy when passed %2F as part of a path and always spits back a 404. It's rumored this is shifty security reasons; see for example: http://mail-archives.apache.org/mod_mbox/httpd-dev/200106.mbox/%3C001901c0f4e0$20da1a30$bb431b09@sashimi%3E We really, *really* don't want to maintain custom patches to Apache again, so we're not likely to change it on our end. (But if Apache changes the behavior in a future version that we upgrade to, we'll be happy to take it.) This can be worked around on the shortcutter's end by using a long-form url, where the title appears in the query string: http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=%s or better yet: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Search?search=%s [the latter has the benefit of redirecting to the target article if it exists and performing a search if it doesn't exist exactly as written]
