[Mediawiki-api] Mediawiki Wikipedia API bug

[Roan Kattouw]

On Tue, Sep 27, 2011 at 6:40 PM, Robert Chin <robert.chin at gmail.com> wrote:
> There appears to be some sort of bug affecting a subset of pages that
> started happening yesterday night. Certain <img src=> tags on
> Wikipedia's API are being served with an invalid URL, missing the
> scheme in front:
>
> <img src="//bits.wikimedia.org/skins-1.17/common/images/magnify-clip.png">
>
These URLs are not invalid, they're protocol-relative. They should
work in every browser. They're officially called 'network-path
references' and specified in  RFC 3986 section 4.2 [1]. If your client
can't deal with these URLs, that's because it doesn't comply with that
RFC.

That said, I should probably have announced that this was happening
yesterday. Per Brad, there was a generic "this is coming"
announcement, but I should've announced the exact time in advance. My
apologies for that. Also, per my earlier announcement, the API will
output http URLs rather than protocol-relative URLs in almost all
cases.

Roan Kattouw (Catrope)

[1] https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc3986#section-4.2