Re: URIs vs. half-baked URIs (was Filesel drag and drop)

[Derek Simkowiak <dereks realloc net>]

-> You can't really distinguish between a half-baked URI (or just really
-> goofy unix filename that might correspond to a literalily saved URI) in
-> the presence of filenames with % marks inside. 

	It's even worse than that.

	Some application servers don't use properly-formatted Query
Strings in their URLs, i.e., you could see something like

http://server/app/getobject.nsf?type=file&name=has%20space&path=/some/path

	Technically, the "/some/path" is supposed to be URL encoded, but
the appserver (the .nsf file in this example) is hard-coded to accept that
un-encoded variable directly.  An application would see this as a properly
formatted URI with a very wacky directory name in the third level down.

	Yes, I have seen this in the real world.  I've seen it in web apps
used by very large companies, which are produced by very large companies.

	Note that something like a %20 (space) could never appear in a
URI, even a file:// URI.  Also note that you never know if a % is supposed
to be just the '%' or the URI encode flag.  (I've seen stuff with hidden
form variables that wind up looking like:

var=has%2520space

	(where %25 is the URI encoding for '%' and %20 is space.)