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Remove PAGE from internal link #192

Closed GoogleCodeExporter closed 9 years ago

GoogleCodeExporter commented 9 years ago 
Currently our internal links are written using the constant PAGE as base for 
the href attribute, and look more or less like this:

<a href='phpliteadmin.php?querystring=etcetc'>something</a>

As far as I know¹ the 'phpliteadmin.php' part is redundant, and 
?querystring=etcetc would be a valid relative url.

<a href='?querystring=etcetc'>something</a>

I also fed the modified code to the xhtml validator and it was accepted.

Although this might seem a small ~16B reduction, we render quite a lot of links 
in each page and they sum up to a few KB. E.g., the table list contains 11 
links per table, which means more than 2KB for a 12-tables database.

Moreover, we would remove about 130 occurrences of ' ".PAGE." ' from the code, 
shaving another kilobyte :)

[1] http://url.spec.whatwg.org/#relative-state

Original issue reported on code.google.com by dreadnaut on 15 Mar 2013 at 5:35

GoogleCodeExporter commented 9 years ago 
Yes, I think that's correct. I am only not 100% sure there is not some stupid 
old browser that gets into trouble.

From what I read in standards, I see one thing problematic: Is this what RTF 
2396 / 3986 call a "Same-document Reference"?
https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc2396#page-15
http://www.rfc-editor.org/rfc/rfc3986.txt (chapter 4.4)

"Traversal of such a reference should not result in an additional retrieval 
action."
(Forms explicitly excluded.)
Hmm. I know browsers do a new request (with new GET parameters), but where does 
the standard say they have to?

I mean, it is fine as long as there is no known browser that misbehaves, which 
I believe is true in this case.
Is there something to support or disprove this?

I just worried whether it is currently like this for a good reason (which does 
not have to be the case ;-) ).

Original comment by crazy4ch...@gmail.com on 17 Mar 2013 at 11:51

GoogleCodeExporter commented 9 years ago 
Quoting the RFC for easier reference:

4.2. Same-document References

   A URI reference that does not contain a URI is a reference to the
   current document.  In other words, an empty URI reference within a
   document is interpreted as a reference to the start of that document,
   and a reference containing only a fragment identifier is a reference
   to the identified fragment of that document.  Traversal of such a
   reference should not result in an additional retrieval action."

This seems to apply to *empty* URIs and an URI is made of many parts, ending in 
a path and an optional query string. The query string is part of the URI, so an 
empty URI has no query string. On the other hand, it can have a fragment id, 
since 4.1 states that fragment identifiers are not part of the URI:

4.1. Fragment Identifier

   [...] As such, it is not part of a URI, but is often used in conjunction with a URI.

Following the above, my interpretation is:

  href=""           ->  not a URI, no retrieval
  href="#fragment"  ->  not a URI, no retrieval
  href="?query=x"   ->  URI, send a request to the server
  <form action=""   ->  form, always request to serve

This means we can remove PAGE from "action" attributes too! :)

At least according to the RFC... how about in the real world? Testing with the 
few browsers I have available, I encountered no trouble with href="" and forms 
without an action attribute, even with older versions of IE.

I found an (invalid) bug report related to this 2002 that confirms the 
interpretation above:
https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=177725

and answers on Stack seem fairly relaxed:
http://stackoverflow.com/questions/15291307/relative-url-containing-just-the-que
rystring

I would think this is something that has been around for a long long time (old 
school CGI era) so browsers have been doing the right thing for more than ten, 
twelve years. I was thinking about adding a safety <base> tag, but that seems 
to create more problems that it would (maybe) solve.

Slightly unrelated: didn't know about http://www.php.net/http_build_query —we 
could investigate if it can simplify our 100+ calls to urlencode().

Original comment by dreadnaut on 18 Mar 2013 at 2:58

GoogleCodeExporter commented 9 years ago 
By the way, I am not too interested in this fix to reduce file size. However, 
it's one step toward simplifying the output code and improving readability.

Original comment by dreadnaut on 18 Mar 2013 at 3:33

GoogleCodeExporter commented 9 years ago 
Thanks for your research.

I also did some further research. Regarding an empty form action, I found this 
one interesting:
https://www.w3.org/Bugs/Public/show_bug.cgi?id=14215#c1
"browsers do weird things with an empty action="" attribute."
Although no browser is given as an example, I guess w3c editors know what they 
are talking about.

And whatwg:
http://www.whatwg.org/specs/web-apps/current-work/multipage/association-of-contr
ols-and-forms.html#attr-fs-action
"The action and formaction content attributes, if specified, must have a value 
that is a valid non-empty URL potentially surrounded by spaces"
(Although we are not using HTML5 yet, I guess whatwg has good reasons to 
require urls "non-empty")

So I think we should _not_ use an empty action attribute, but rather have no 
action attribute at all (or specify it completely). In most cases, we specify 
GET parameters anyway.

http_build_query looks useful, but only if we want to encode more than 1 
parameter, and most of the time table is the only parameter we encode.

Original comment by crazy4ch...@gmail.com on 18 Mar 2013 at 4:02

GoogleCodeExporter commented 9 years ago 
| So I think we should _not_ use an empty action attribute, but rather have no 
action
| attribute at all (or specify it completely).

Agreed!

I'll leave this aside until we close Issue 190 then, and after that I'll 
prepare a patch where I remove PAGE from <a> tags only, leaving only the query 
string.

Original comment by dreadnaut on 18 Mar 2013 at 4:29

GoogleCodeExporter commented 9 years ago 
Here's a patch removing most occurrences of PAGE from urls, following the 
discussion above.

Original comment by dreadnaut on 1 Apr 2013 at 9:29

Attachments:

GoogleCodeExporter commented 9 years ago 
Hmm. Leaving out the form action parameter seems to be invalid xhtml 1.1 trans 
(see screenshot).

So as long as we stick to xhtml, I guess we should better not omit it.

Original comment by crazy4ch...@gmail.com on 2 Apr 2013 at 9:37

Attachments:

GoogleCodeExporter commented 9 years ago 
I see, I'll add them back and then commit then.

When are we switching to HTML? :)

Original comment by dreadnaut on 2 Apr 2013 at 10:44

GoogleCodeExporter commented 9 years ago 
This issue was closed by revision r399.

Original comment by dreadnaut on 4 Apr 2013 at 1:12

GoogleCodeExporter commented 9 years ago

Original comment by crazy4ch...@gmail.com on 2 Jan 2014 at 4:27