Has Google finally reached the ultimate Microsoft state, "breaking standards for fun and for profit" ? In a recent entry on the Google Operating System blog (not affiliated with Google) two screen shots show #fragments instead of ?queries. My attempt to post a comment had no visible effect, maybe comments are moderated or the blogger template is broken or whatever the problem might be, zero feedback to users is just wrong. Google Chrome lost the content of the comment form before I could reproduce it verbatim here, in essence it said:
In URLs a hash mark "#" introduces the optional fragment at the end of the URL, and a question mark "?" introduces the optional query part — also at the end of the URL, but before any fragment.
Fragments are the local business of the client (browser) and depend on the document (MIME type). Queries are the business of the server, e.g., many servers expect name=value pairs separated by ampersands "&", other severs also permit semicolons ";" as separator, and so on.
The query syntax depends on the scheme, here http:, the details depend on the server, but in both cases the overall URL syntax would require to percent-encode "#" if it is a part of the query not intended to start the fragment.
Notably fragments do not participate in redirections from one scheme or server to another scheme or server, the target location never sees the source fragment — browsers are not expected to transmit a fragment in requests such as HTTP GET.
In other words, something is wrong in the googlesystem screen shots.
2 comments:
No conspiracy and nothing is wrong. The query part (before the #) is processed by the server. The fragment (after the #) is client side only and not sent to the server.
Anything that looks like a query in the fragment (after the #) is not a query. It's just processed by the page's javascript on the client side.
Well, it is nice that I can still guess the original URL with a query, but I can't use the "fragmented" incarnation for a working bookmark. Maybe that is also true for the original query, and then it wouldn't matter.
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