Stas wrote: > Matthew, can you please repost it to the mod_perl list? > There are many more people who can followup on this. > Thanks.
I won't be subscribed long enough to read any replies to this mesg, but am posting here at Stas' suggestion. Hopefully someone here will be able to update the docs if appropriate.
Yesterday I was reading http://perl.apache.org/docs/tutorials/client/browserbugs/browserbugs.html
and noticed:
> either you should avoid using such keys
> or you should separate parameter pairs
> with ; instead of &This is fine advice. It's standards compliant and *should* work perfectly. In practice, it does work with one exception. MSIE (or at least certain recent versions of it) can fail to redirect properly if you use ; separators in a URL which is used in a meta redirect tag.
Suppose the URL to which you're redirecting is supposed to contain a parameter "volt" with value "1" and another parameter "amp" with a value of "2".
The URL could be either of these two if you're using CGI.pm
http://example.com/?volt=1&=2
http://example.com/?volt=1;amp=2Since the URL is appearing in HTML, then you have to HTML entity encode the URL, which means that the URL in your meta redirect tag needs to be either of these two
http://example.com/?volt=1&amp=2
http://example.com/?volt=1;amp=2
Either of those *should* work in functional browsers.
However, (at least certain versions of) MSIE will incorrectly read those two urls (if found in meta redirects) as
http://example.com/?volt=1&amp=2
http://example.com/?volt=1
Note that the second URL lost everything after the semicolon. In versions of MSIE which are afflicted in this manner, you can only have semicolons in your URL if they are the terminal characters of HTML entity encoding sequences.
This means that in your meta redirects you *must* use the encoded & character (& or a numeric encoding) to separate your parameter name/value pairs *unless* you can be certain that none of your users will be using one of the broken browsers.
See also http://rt.cpan.org/NoAuth/Bug.html?id=2130
I thought this note might be appropriate to add to http://perl.apache.org/docs/tutorials/client/browserbugs/browserbugs.html
-matt (who is now unsubscribing. Thanks for your time :)
