Hello,
A discussion started on
http://musicbrainz.org/showmod.html?modid=4161538 has prompted me to
bring this up here on the list because we may need some guidelines
written for the use of % in URL ARs. OpenDataRelationshipClass currently
has nothing regarding the use of any special characters in URLs.
By default, Wikipedia URLs use %28 and %29 to represent ( and ) and %26
for &. No one other than a power-user will know that Wikipedia URLs can
be converted to one without % using the character the %nn represents.
For example, for the band Cameo, Wikipedia defaults to
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cameo_%28band%29
but we can use
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cameo_(band)
to reach the same information. Note that in MB's interface, the last )
is not dropped as it is here in this email so it's perfectly usable.
Unfortunately though, this conversion cannot be done with Discogs URLs.
http://www.discogs.com/artist/Emerson,+Lake+%26+Palmer
is unreachable using
http://www.discogs.com/artist/Emerson,+Lake+&+Palmer.
So what should be the norm? Since I'm currently seeing % URLs all over
MusicBrainz, I have to wonder first, what the problem is (I suspect it's
an encoding issue), second, how do we standardize the process when
different sites use different standards, and third, how can we expect a
regular user to have the aforethought to convert % URLs? It's certainly
nothing I would have thought of if clutcher2 hadn't brought it to my
attention. I mean, I just copy the URL from the browser address bar and
paste it into MusicBrainz like everyone else does, right?
Cheers!
Paula (spacefish)
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