[whatwg] URL query component

[Julian Reschke]

On 2012-04-20 14:37, And Clover wrote:
> On 2012-04-20 09:15, Anne van Kesteren wrote:
>> Currently browsers differ for what happens when the code point cannot
>> be encoded.
>> What Gecko does [?%C2%A3] makes the resulting data impossible to
>> interpret.
>> What WebKit does [?%26%23163%3B] is consistent with form submission. I
>> like it.
>
> I do not! It makes the data impossible to recover just as Gecko does...
> in fact worse, because at least Gecko preserves ASCII. With the WebKit
> behaviour it becomes impossible to determine from an pure ASCII string
> '£' whether the user really typed '€' or '£' into the input
> field.
>
> It has the advantage of consistency with the POST behaviour, but that
> behaviour is an unpleasant legacy hack which encourages a
> misunderstanding of HTML-escaping that promotes XSS vulns. I would not
> like to see it spread any further than it already has.

+1

Indeed.

I think this is a case where you want to fail early (for some value of 
"fail"); so maybe substituting with "?" makes most sense.

Do any servers *expect* the Webkit behavior? If they do so, why don't 
they just fix the pages they serve to use UTF-8 to get consistent 
behavior throughout?

Best regards, Julian