[WM] Backslashes in URLs

[Justin Mason]

Norbert Gawor said:

> I also did a similar patch using the HTML beautifier to convert all
> backslashes to normal slashes.
> Running ActiveState Perl on Win95.
> Also removed prefixes from URLs like "../thisdir" which unnecessarily
> specified
> "up, then down to the current directory". (This would cause these
> relative
> links to be broken, if I upload the files to a different server
> directory.)

I'd be interested in incorporating this patch, it sounds worthwhile.

> All these problems seem to have to do with the handling of backslashes.
> I would like to keep the whole system on Windows platform anyway.
> Could be a bug in the perl module File::Spec ?

I think what's happening is that File::Spec is doing the right thing;
it's making the paths in a windows-native format.  But then the paths
are being used in hrefs, where /'s are the correct format.

I think fixing it in the HTML beautifier is the best plan - as it
allows other fix-ups to be applied, e.g.:

    - warnings about FrontPage brokenness (href="C:\Some\Path" etc.)

    - other backslashes from the HTML source itself, rather than from
    webmake

    - etc.

--j.