The URL http://www.mwave.com/ uses a redirect in its HTML to redirect you to another place. The tag is: meta http-equiv="refresh" content="1; URL=//direct.mwave.com/mwave/home.hmx?" (leading and trailing pointies were removed to not confuse browsers). I believe that the "URL=//" nonsense is incorrect syntax BUT Netscape 4.7 (and Internet Destroyer 5) manage to interpret it and direct you to http://direct.mwave.com/mwave/home.hmx? Mozilla will instead redirect you to http://www.mwave.com//direct.mwave.com/mwave/home.hmx? (which is obviously not where I intended to end up). So while I think this is bad HTML, users expect bug-for-bug compatability with current browsers.

Gagan -- I think I noticed that you're supposed to get the URL redirect bugs. If not, can you please reassign it?

Common sense says that if something that is meant to be interpreted *as a URL* starts with "//" then all that is necessary is to add a default URL scheme ("http:" here) and away you go. It certainly makes sense to prepend "http:" as the default scheme before "//" in any context where the "//" could not be the beginning of a UNC filespec. And in this case, UNC filespecs are irrelevant, and "http:" is the only possibility: <meta http-equiv= ... > rather does imply "http:" URLs. This could be required by a standard. If so, it would be the same standard that governs the use of relative URLs like "../img/background.gif" and "/index.html" within an HTML document. I believe that section 5 of RFC 2396 "Uniform Resource Identifiers (URI): Generic Syntax" <URL:http://www.ietf.org/rfc/rfc2396.txt> (updating RFC 1808 "Relative Uniform Resource Locators") applies here. Quoting from near the beginning of section 5: > The syntax for relative URI takes advantage of the <hier_part> syntax > of <absoluteURI> (Section 3) in order to express a reference that is > relative to the namespace of another hierarchical URI. > > relativeURI = ( net_path | abs_path | rel_path ) [ "?" query ] > > A relative reference beginning with two slash characters is termed a > network-path reference, as defined by <net_path> in Section 3. Such > references are rarely used. Rarely used, but apparently legal.

Yes, this is legal, but the current urlparser does not recognize this as a crippled absolute url. Also it is not correctly interpreted as a relative url. This can be verified with urltest -abs / One of the first testcases shows this problem. I hoped we could live with that, but apparently we can't.

bug 19917 addresses this problem in general

*** This bug has been marked as a duplicate of 19917 ***

Agreed. Marking verified dup of 19917.

SPAM. HTML Element component deprecated, changing component to Layout. See bug 88132 for details.