when href's specify query string only

sneakyimp

I've got some code written by other folks which neglects to specify a file...just a query string:

<a href="?foo=bar">click me</a>

I've seen situations where the currently loaded file is assumed -- as when a form has an empty action attribute. However, this types of links are not working on my server. I think they were working on the previous version.

Questions:
Is this commonly accept practice?

Why would it work on one server and not another -- is there some apache setting which tells which file to assume?

dagon

fairly common, it appends to the current url what ever that may be.

It will work if appending to the current url makes a valid url that your server is expecting, but not if it doesn't, there no particular Apache issue setting, its the browse that's making the url anyway

sneakyimp

Actually it doesn't always append to the current url. I think it may have something to do with mod_rewrite. For instance, on a page like this:
http://www.mysite.com/sub/dir/library.php
I've got a link:

<a href="#" onclick="launchVideo('53-1011.00','Aircraft Cargo Handling Supervisors','wmv');"><img src="../../images/windows_media_mini.gif" alt="Play Video in Windows Media Player" border="0" width="13" height="13"></a>

Note the single # with no filename.

Clicking this link in Firefox 3.6.8 opens the popup window but navigates the main browser window to http://www.mysite.com/sub/dir/#.

I had similar problems with links that were not dealing with Javascript. The problem is that the filename gets dropped and the query string appended after a trailing slash. I could swear these links used to work and now they don't. Fixing them is tedious.

dagon

that's because of the javascript. It would append with out it.

sneakyimp

It's not the javascript. This file is at http://mydomain.com/dir/test.php

<!DOCTYPE HTML PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.01//EN" "http://www.w3.org/TR/html4/strict.dtd">
<html>
<body>
chump here.
<a href="#" onClick="alert('yo momma');">a link</a>
</body>
</html>

You click it and you get the alert with no navigation. The page doesn't change it merely visits the anchor.

I have determined my problem is due to the presence of a base tag. This file behaves differently:

<!DOCTYPE HTML PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.01//EN" "http://www.w3.org/TR/html4/strict.dtd">
<html>
<head>
<base href="http://mydomain.com/dir/" />	
<meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=utf-8">
<title>Untitled Document</title>
</head>

<body>
chump here.
<a href="#" onClick="alert('yo momma');">a link</a>
</body>
</html>

I need the base tag because of some mod_rewrite stuff I did for SEO. Without it, all of the images and javascript were breaking. Bottom line: no simple fix. I need to fix all of these links (dozens of them).