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Subject: 
Re: URL characters
Newsgroups: 
lugnet.publish
Date: 
Mon, 26 Jul 1999 21:41:21 GMT
Viewed: 
4482 times
  
In lugnet.publish, sparre@sys-323.risoe.dk (Jacob Sparre Andersen) writes:

[...]
Similarly if people type <slash> <tilde> <n> <o> (expecting
"/~no"...) most systems will return "/ño".

I have actually seen the latter of these two misprints in a
Danish newspaper.

So what's up with that, anyway?  How the heck did ~ gain such huge
popularity if it's not officially allowed in URLs?

Both the original CERN http daemon and Apache uses ~ for
user home pages.

Was it allowed once upon a time?

Dunno.

It has probably been allowed until people started thinking
about which characters gives trouble.
[...]

Wow.  OK, that certainly makes sense.  So, the hypothesis is that "~" may
have been disallowed so that commonly available software (which used "~" for
special formatting tricks) for certain languages didn't have to be altered
to parse-recognize URLs and avoid converting "~" in those cases?  In other
words, it may have been a legacy thing for backward compatibility with
existing text processing tools?

--Todd



Message has 2 Replies:
  Re: URL characters
 
Todd Lehman: (...) It works like I described (at least the ~n case) even in Word97/Win95(DK), so I am not sure it is correct to call it a "backward" compatibility problem[1]. People have to learn to type <tilde> <space> to get a tilde on most (...) (25 years ago, 27-Jul-99, to lugnet.publish)
  Re: URL characters
 
Jacob Sparre Andersen skrev i meddelandet ... (...) for (...) It has nothing to do with different software (MS or others), it's in the keyboard driver (OK, that's probably MS). On a Swedish keyboard '~' is a 'dead char', which is automatically (...) (25 years ago, 31-Jul-99, to lugnet.publish)

Message is in Reply To:
  Re: URL characters
 
Todd Lehman: (...) The primary reason for disallowing ~ is the special treatment it gets in several European languages. If people type <slash> <tilde> <s> <p> (expecting "/~sp") some systems will just return "sp". Similarly if people type <slash> (...) (25 years ago, 26-Jul-99, to lugnet.publish)

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