[Docutils-develop] Re: Cloaking email addresses

[Felix W. <Fel...@gm...>]

David Goodger wrote:

> I'm not asking you to.  But you already provided an example where the
> proposed new feature is unsupported, which is enough for me to veto
> the idea.

First, it turns out that "links" has the problem with or without XHTML
header.

Second, it turns out that "links" chokes on the current cloaking
mechanism as well:

The email address in <http://www.ososo.de/misc/email-now.html> ends up
being interpreted as
"@_46_65_6C_69_78_2E_57_69_65_6D_61_6E_6E_40_67_6D_78_2E_6E_65_74".

With my proposed change, as in
<http://www.ososo.de/misc/email-proposed.html>, the email address ends
up as "@Felix.Wiemann_40gmx.net", which is better.

So the current implementation already lacks universal support.  The
proposed change doesn't worsen the problem.  On the contrary, it makes
the email address reconstructable should a browser be unable to decode
it.

Can I go ahead and make the change?

> That's applying 2 encoding steps, which requires 2 steps to decode.

These two steps happen in two different layers of the browser: One in
the HTML parser (decoding entities), the other one in the URI handler
(decoding "%xx" characters).

That's why it isn't fragile, and why *no* existing browser has a problem
with the indirection.  (Links' problem is not the indirection but the
"%xx" hex-encoding, as you can see from the first example above.)

-- 
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"the number of contributors [...] is strongly and inversely correlated with the
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