Re: Google does not work?

On 14/09/2025 17:02, David Woolley wrote:
> Thinking more about it, it may actually be correct to escape the quotes 
> there.  It would need some research on the quoting rules, but it 
> wouldn't be possible to use meta to simulate arbitrary HTTP headers, if 
> there wasn't a level of unescaping of quotes, although dropping the 
> quotes entirely may be enough here. I think this is a Lynx bug.

The problem here seems to be that Refresh is a hack introduced by the 
mainstream browser developers, and W3C, in their dying days of control 
over web browsers, tried to kill it off.  I think it was actually 
created as the meta element, but the implementations also handled it as 
a real HTTP header.

The problem with this history is that there is no detailed formal 
specification.  However, HTTP/1.1 generally allows quoted strings as 
values, so I think the quotes are valid, but they are redundant, as URLs 
are not allowed to contain linear white space, and it should be ignored, 
so there is no need to protect them with quotes.

As such, I think Lynx should tolerate quotes, but DDG should avoid using 
them, in the first place.

Firefox handles the redirect with Refresh and " successfully, when 
run with scripting off.

Incidentally, the lite version seems to be reserved for IE6. There is an 
IE type conditional in the html version that redirects to that version. 
It looks like the lite version uses HTML 3 presentational markup (lots 
of br's), with no styles and no images.