Comment by meindnoch
6 months ago
>No one wants to see results for the letter "a"
Don't make assumptions about what the user may or may not want to search for.
E.g. in my music collection I have albums from both !!! [1] and Ø [2]. I've encountered software that "helpfully" prevented me from searching for these artists, because the developers thought that surely noone would search for such terms.
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[1] https://www.discogs.com/artist/207714-!!! ← See? The HN link highlighter also thinks that URLs cannot end with !!!.
No, you should definitely exercise good judgement in delivering a good UI to the user that doesn't lock up if they happen to type very quickly. But it is context dependent, and sometimes you will want to show them results for "a", sure. "No one" was rhetorical.
In your example, the developers have exercised poor judgment by making a brittle assumption about the data. That's bad. But there is no UX without some model of the user. Making assumptions about user's rate of perception is much safer (in a web app context, it would be a different story in a competitive esports game).
Let's see if surrounding that URL in the URL-surrounding character pair helps the HN linkifier:
<https://www.discogs.com/artist/207714-!!!>
Edit: It does. So, this would be yet another of the squillion-ish examples to support the advice "Please, for the love of god, always enclose your URLs in '<>'.". (And if you're writing a general-purpose URL linkifier, PLEASE just assume that everything between those characters IS part of the URL, rather than assuming you know better than the user.)
URLs can contain > too.
I don't believe that they can, not unencoded. Check out the grammar in the relevant RFC[0], as well as the discussion about URL-unsafe characters in the RFC that's updated by 3986 [1], from which I'll quote below.
> Characters can be unsafe for a number of reasons. ... The characters "<" and ">" are unsafe because they are used as the delimiters around URLs in free text
Also note the "APPENDIX" section on page 22 of RFC1738, which provides recommendations for embedding URLs in other contexts (like, suchas, in an essay, email, or internet forum post.)
Do you have standards documents that disagree with these IETF ones?
If you're using the observed behavior of your browser's address bar as your proof that ">" is valid in a URL, do note that the URL
might appear to contain a space and the ">" character, but it is actually represented as
behind the scenes. Your web browser is pretty-printing it for you so it looks nicer and is easier to read.
[0] <https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/html/rfc3986#appendix-A>
[1] <https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/html/rfc1738#section-2.2>
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