Website metadata allows invalid characters which break the RDF feed

[IVORW@…]

Mon Oct 17 03:00:04 2005 IVORW - Ticket created [Reply] [Comment]

Subject: Website metadata allows invalid characters which break the RDF feed

Currently, no syntax validation is performed on the field "website". This actually allows square bracket syntax, such as the page:

http://london.openguides.org/index.cgi?Peckham_Rye_Common_And_Park

Unfortunately, this cleverness breaks anything parsing the RDF data (attached).

Either this metadata field should be validated more strictly in the commit function (probably a good idea), or we should at least cater for square bracket links in the RDF feed.

Download (untitled) 458b

Download Peckham_Rye_Common_And_Park.rdf 1.7k

[IVORW@…]

This one isn't broken.

[Kake]

Decision: We need to figure out whether this allowing of square brackets in the website field should be supported or not. There are arguments on both sides: on the one hand, it's a handy way to let people supply text for the link, to avoid having huge long URLs spreading across the screen; but on the other, it means that every time we want to spit out the website datum (e.g. in RDF) we have to parse the field. There's also the issue that if people have used this feature a lot then they might be annoyed if we remove it.

Decided that Kake will post to the list summarising the problem and asking for opinions on whether we should support this "feature" or not.

[Kake]

Consensus on the list is that we should remove this "feature" and use link text based on a truncated URL, like so:

* Website: http://this-url-is-really-long.com/and-it...                       
or                                                                            
* Website: http://quiteshortsite.com/

The number of characters retained in the URL should be admin-configurable, and default to 20.

[dom]

The offending code starts here.