[whatwg] IE/Win treats backslashes in path as forward slashes

Kornel Lesinski kornel at osiolki.net
Wed Apr 11 14:27:48 PDT 2007


On Wed, 11 Apr 2007 14:02:39 +0100, Geoffrey Sneddon  
<foolistbar at googlemail.com> wrote:

> Looking through the spec again, there is nothing about backslashes in  
> URI's path being treated as a forward slash, behaviour needed for  
> compatibility for quite a few websites.

I think it can be added.

RFC 1738 calls backslash "unsafe" (RFC 2396 "unwise") character and says  
it must be encoded, so this change won't affect any valid URLs/URIs.

I've tested how browsers handle path in <img> tag:
IE6, Opera 9.2, Safari 2 translate "\" to "/". Camino (Gecko 1.8) and iCab  
3 translate it to "%5C".
All browsers leave "%5C" alone, meaning that this change won't stop anyone  
 from accessing resources that really contain backslash in the path (tested  
Apache2 on OS X 10.4).

-- 
regards, Kornel Lesiński



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