2011/2/8 Neil Van Dyke <[email protected]>: > Eli Barzilay wrote at 02/08/2011 11:51 AM: >> >> [...] It looks like in recent versions of apache (2.2.17) when rewrite >> rules are applied the URIs will always get escaped. This leads to problems >> with the racket server's urls -- something like "servlets;blah" gets >> substituted as "servlets%3Bblah", which means that the ";" lost its [...] >> > > Looks like there's been a standards change, and you might want to change the > Racket Web Server... > > I'm not sure what happened, but RFC 2396 used to give special meaning to > semicolon (denoting parameters on path segments in hierarchical URIs), but > that was obsoleted by RFC 3986, which seemed to remove the special meaning. > > I've never seen anyone use semicolons in the RFC 2396 intended way in > practice. The PLT Web Server and a couple of other frameworks use them only > on the last path segment (in RFC 2396 interpretation). > > In light of the interpretation of RFC 3986, perhaps the Racket Web Server > should resort to parsing the ";" out of the last path segment, after > unescaping. Alternatively, stop using semicolon, and put the information in > an (HTML form GET-like) name-value query parameter of the HTTP URL instead.
A little background... * The Web server has always used this, so the design choice didn't originate with me. * When *I* think about why it is a good idea, here's what I come up with: using a GET parameter would potentially conflict with the servlet and would be more visible (through request-bindings) to the servlet [the parameter is still visible, but is harder to see]; the fact that path parameters are used so infrequently is actually a feature because it is so much less likely to conflict with something the servlet will be trying to do. It is hard to customize this on a servlet-by-servlet basis, because the key in the URL is what allows the Web server to associate the request with a servlet (which is where this customization would live), so it is (kind of) the one part that can't really be customized. Jay > > There might be newer specs I'm not aware of. I last implemented RFC 2396, > and actually had robust and efficient support for semicolon as they wanted > it at the time. :) > > -- > http://www.neilvandyke.org/ > _________________________________________________ > For list-related administrative tasks: > http://lists.racket-lang.org/listinfo/users > -- Jay McCarthy <[email protected]> Assistant Professor / Brigham Young University http://faculty.cs.byu.edu/~jay "The glory of God is Intelligence" - D&C 93 _________________________________________________ For list-related administrative tasks: http://lists.racket-lang.org/listinfo/users
