[racket-dev] URL escaping: question for web experts

No guru here, but my experience has been that every url encoder is 
slightly different - I don't think there's a broad consensus on edge 
cases.  I'd say go for it.

On 12/17/2012 06:59 AM, Eli Barzilay wrote:
> For many people there is a constant source of annoyance when you
> copy+paste doc URLs into a markdown context as with stackoverflow and
> others.  The problem is that these URLs have parens in them and at
> least in Chrome, the copied URL still has them -- and because markdown
> texts use parens for URLs "[text](url)" they get confused which means
> that you have to manually replace parens with %28 and %29.
>
> Danny submitted a pull request that eventually got changed by Matthew
> into a new parameter that controls which characters get encoded by
> `net/uri-codec', so it can escape these too.  The result on Chrome is
> that the copied URL has the escapes instead of parens, and clicking
> such a URL makes the copy-able address have the escapes too.  The
> actuall page that is displayed is still the same one, of course, it's
> just weird that Chrome has a certain context where the original URL
> string is preserved as is.  (It even considered the escaped URL as one
> that I didn't visit, even though I visited the one with the unescaped
> parens.)
>
> In any case, given all of this I thought that maybe the default mode
> could do the extra escaping -- it seems to me that there is no damage
> with doing that, since in theory every character could be escaped
> anyway.  There's a minor overhead of a few extra characters, but
> there's the above benefit of doing it (which might be a temporary
> thing for all I know).
>
> Neither Matthew nor I feel confident enough to have this encoding be
> the default without consulting some potential web standard gurus.
>
> So?
>