Bug in Mozilla 1.6 AND in Firefox 1.0?

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Discussion Overview

The discussion revolves around a problem encountered when attempting to download lecture notes in .pps format from a specific website using Mozilla Firefox 1.0 and Mozilla 1.6. Participants explore the nature of the issue, potential causes, and solutions.

Discussion Character

  • Technical explanation, Debate/contested

Main Points Raised

  • The original poster reports an issue where only one specific lecture file can be downloaded, while others return a "Not Found" error.
  • One participant, Warren, suggests that the issue is not a bug but rather due to the use of backslash characters in the URLs instead of forward slashes, which leads to non-compliant URLs.
  • Warren proposes a workaround of manually changing the backslashes to forward slashes in the URLs to successfully download the files.
  • The original poster acknowledges Warren's explanation and admits to having noticed the backslash but not realizing the full encoding.
  • Another participant comments on the perceived laziness of programmers regarding URL compliance.

Areas of Agreement / Disagreement

Participants generally agree on the cause of the issue being related to URL formatting rather than a bug in the browsers. However, there is no consensus on the broader implications of such programming practices.

Contextual Notes

The discussion does not address the implications of browser behavior regarding non-compliant URLs or the potential need for further technical standards in web development.

Who May Find This Useful

Web developers, users experiencing similar download issues, and those interested in browser behavior regarding URL compliance.

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Bug in Mozilla 1.6 AND in Firefox 1.0?

I've been trying to download lecture notes (.pps files) from this website:

http://www-cs.engr.ccny.cuny.edu/~zhu/GC-Spring2005/CSc80000-2-VisionCourse.html

The ONLY one that I can get with Mozilla Firefox 1.0 OR with Mozilla 1.6 is the "Lecture 5" file. For all of the others the result is

Not Found
The requested URL ... bla bla bla ... was not found on this server.

This, despite the fact that I have both Mozillas configured to update the cache every time I view a page, AND I have manually cleared the entire cache anyway.

MS Internet Explorer downloads and opens all of these links with no problem.

(Note, no problems with the "Homework" files, and no problem with the "Lecture 5" ppt file. Only the pps files are eluding me.)

Any ideas?
 
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It's not a bug. The person who made the webpage used a backslash character in the links, when (s)he should have used a forward slash. The resulting URLs are not compliant, and there is no general protocol browsers should use when trying to deal with non-compliant URLs.

The easiest thing to do is to copy the URL, change the "%5C" (the ASCII for the backslash, encoded) to a forward slash, and download the files with any browser you prefer.

- Warren
 
Thanks Warren. That's it.

Funny, while I was playing around with it, I noticed that backslash and tried replacing "%5" with a / (but I didn't realize the first "C" was part of the code too).

(I hope the Mozilla people will forgive me for insulting their browser.) o:) o:)
 
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Lazy programmers. . . tsk tsk.