ayg wrote:

I guess for sanity it might be best to do this for *all* pages, in fact. Or
none. Does anyone have an opinion? It would seem to be the standards-y thing
to do. Harder to read, of course, but it doesn't need to be more than an alias.
The main issue would of course be if anyone was clever enough to make a page
already with a literal "%2F" in it, but that seems to give an outright 404 (see
URL).

Would this just require a preprocessing variable modification in index.php, or
would that be ugly? We don't really need links, etc. to normalize this way, we
just have to make sure they can't contain the string literally (which it doesn't
look like they can right now). Input URLs are the only things that could
usefully work this way.

will_pittenger wrote:

I have to disagree with the "enhancement" label. The problem interfers with the
basic functionality.

ayg wrote:

No, it does not. Basic functionality does not include correct interfacing with
every conceivable third-party program, or even every popular third-party
program. If Firefox isn't flexible enough to handle MediaWiki's format, then it
would be *good* for us to adjust MediaWiki to better interface with Firefox, but
it's not a *bug* if we don't. Bugs are only present when unintended behavior
occurs; when intended but undesirable behavior occurs, that's an enhancement
request.

robchur wrote:

Meh, it's a moot point, to be honest; I'd class it as a minor bug. Each has his
own priorities. :)

This is actually a low-level issue with Apache; it seems rather unhappy when
passed %2F as part of a path and always spits back a 404.

It's rumored this is shifty security reasons; see for example:
http://mail-archives.apache.org/mod_mbox/httpd-dev/200106.mbox/%3C001901c0f4e0$20da1a30$bb431b09@sashimi%3E

We really, *really* don't want to maintain custom patches to Apache again, so
we're not likely to change it on our end. (But if Apache changes the behavior in
a future version that we upgrade to, we'll be happy to take it.)

This can be worked around on the shortcutter's end by using a long-form url,
where the title appears in the query string:
http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=%s

or better yet:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Search?search=%s

[the latter has the benefit of redirecting to the target article if it exists
and performing a search if it doesn't exist exactly as written]