On Tue, Sep 9, 2008 at 11:15 PM, Gregory Maxwell <gmaxwell(a)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.