Re: [tlug] Website Question(s)

["Lyle (Hiroshi) Saxon" <ronfaxon@example.com>]

Matt Gushee wrote:

>> [LHS] Thank you very much for this answer.  One more question - would 
>> it be better to set up my links with "%7E" in stead of "~"?
>
>
> As far as I know it's not really necessary. There are tons of URLs 
> that use '~', and I've never heard of a browser not being able to 
> handle it. Maybe there are certain (human) languages where it becomes 
> problematic, but that's just a guess.


The language angle is one thing I've been wondering about - the person 
having trouble with the links is in Portugal....

>>  [LHS] I'm assuming not and I hadn't worried about it until the issue 
>> of a friend having trouble opening some of my pages came up.  What I 
>> still find strange though, is how I'll click on one of my links which 
>> is set up with the "~" mark, and sometimes that's exactly what is 
>> displayed in the address bar and other times it's been converted.  If 
>> it were all one way or the other, I would just get used to it, but 
>> the erratic behavior part of it is what's confusing.
>
>
> Indeed. You're saying that the exact same link will be displayed 
> differently at times? No idea why that would happen. Still, any 
> reasonable Web browser (including Mozilla-based browsers and MSIE 5+) 
> should do the right thing whichever way the character is displayed.


Yes, the exact same link from the exact same page and page location!

More details....  Last night, I wanted to send a link, so I clicked on 
the link to double check the page and then went to copy the addresses 
out of the address bar... noticed that it was converted into "%7E", so I 
went to another page of my site that has the link written out, copy 
pasted that, and got this:
http://www5d.biglobe.ne.jp/~LLLtrs/PhotoGlryMain/pgb/Kurihama01a.html 
<http://www5d.biglobe.ne.jp/%7ELLLtrs/PhotoGlryMain/pgb/Kurihama01a.html>

The upper version is what is in text, and while the link was created 
with the exact same address, just copy-pasting that into an e-mail 
produced the above after the HTML formatting was converted to plain 
text.  Then, I got this reply from the person in Portugal:

"I just had some free time at the office to check out the new page. By 
the way, the second link doesn't work."

And then, on the page you suggested, I found this:

"Percent character ("%") 25 37  This is used to URL encode/escape other 
characters, so it should itself also be encoded."

So... am I looking at a situation where if the link is received with the 
"~" mark, the receiving browser converts it and there's no problem, but 
if it has been converted *before* it gets to the receiving browser, it 
sees the "%" mark and ends up converting it to something unreadable?  
Now that I've written that out, it seems to make sense.  Now... how do I 
stop the link from being changed before it gets to people's computers 
then?  Thinking of the frequency of how often I get the converted 
version in the address bar - it seems about the same as the reports I'm 
getting from Portugal of pages that aren't opening.....  I'm using 
Mozilla 1.7.8.....

Lyle