Wikipedia urls ending in punctuation are unreliably broken or not depending on caching and the platform, so if you put a # on the end to escape it, it fixes it, without having to worry about percent encoding.
The problem here is that the HN URL encoding interpreted the period as the end-of-sentence rather than as part of the URL. It would be simply bizarre for any browser or web server to choke on a perfectly legal dot to end a URL.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Man_or_Astro-man%3F is another story -- since "?" is a reserved character in URLs for CGI queries. Enter the question mark anyway, and the article comes up! Why? There's a redirect without it!
For Wikipedia's gory details on technical restrictions for article titles: (note that HN properly parses this article title ending in a right-paren)
> The problem here is that the HN URL encoding interpreted the period as the end-of-sentence rather than as part of the URL.
That’s the first problem.
> It would be simply bizarre for any browser or web server to choke on a perfectly legal dot to end a URL.
I agree? I never said anything like this. My original comment was:
> Wikipedia urls ending in punctuation are unreliably broken or not depending on caching and the platform, so if you put a # on the end to escape it, it fixes it, without having to worry about percent encoding.
I mentioned the platform specifically, which in this context could be either the server context or client context. You mentioned server/client context, as in what HN serves the user or vice versa. I mentioned that and client context inclusively. If you’re correcting me, assume I need you to show my error.
> Enter the question mark anyway, and the article comes up! Why? There's a redirect without it!
It seemed that the issue was incorrectly diagnosed, and MediaWiki or Wikipedia was being blamed for the error, and that you had also proposed a rather strange workaround for it. The issue could be solved completely within the context of Hacker News post markup, as linked.
If you put a hashtag at the end of a Wikipedia URL, then I suppose it works, until the URL already has a hashtag in it, because these are used for section headings. It's not called "escaping" anything, it's just... an empty URI fragment: a link to the top of the article?
There is also nothing preventing a Wikipedia editor from creating a redirect from the title y'all linked. In fact it's a perfectly fine idea for a redirect. The fact is that the canonical title is in US English, and in US English, "Inc." takes a period as an abbreviation.
There's nothing wrong with your workaround or your percent-encodings to escape some dubious glyph, but I hoped to clarify things and derail the thread further on pedantic technicalities. Thank you for coming to my TED talk.
> It's not called "escaping" anything, it's just... an empty URI fragment: a link to the top of the article?
It’s an escape from pedantry.
I appreciate your gentle needling, as imprecision in my words reflects an imprecision in my rhetoric, making it vulnerable to nitpicking. It’s okay to be wrong if it allows me to make a larger point in favor of my position, but at a cost to readers’ time and patience.
Thanks for your close reading and feedback, it helps.
Wikipedia urls ending in punctuation are unreliably broken or not depending on caching and the platform, so if you put a # on the end to escape it, it fixes it, without having to worry about percent encoding.