On Tue, Sep 9, 2008 at 11:15 PM, Gregory Maxwell gmaxwell@gmail.com wrote:
Huh? Did you actually try saving a page?
A protocol relative url is a relative URL. We would use them where sites normally use relative URLs, but where we currently use fully qualified URLs because our 'site' spans many domain names (i.e. en.wikipedia.org and upload.wikimedia.org).
If you take some relative URLs from a website and merely write them into a file, of course it isn't going to work. Which is why browsers do not do anything like that when you save a page.
Browsers support relative URLS in saved copies by rewriting them at save time. Otherwise all relative URLs would break in saved documents, and the overwhelming majority of anchors and images on sites outside of Wikipedia are fully relative paths.
I just tested several browsers and they rewrote protocol relative URLs just as they do for any other kind relative URL. Images get saved and work fine. Links get fully qualified out just fine. It just works(tm).
I also tried this on a captured copy of the Wikipedia HTML. It works just as I'd expect.
As far as I can tell there is no problem here, but perhaps I'm missing something.
As usual, I spoke before I tested, or thought. If you save it as a simple HTML file it breaks, but as you point out, so does every other link on the page. This is a non-issue, sorry for bringing it up. Or at least for bringing it up with such unwarranted alarm.