Re: [Full-Disclosure] another product affected by recent MS IE '@' patch

[Guido van Rooij <guido@gvr.org>]

On Mon, Feb 09, 2004 at 10:42:18AM +1300, Nick FitzGerald wrote:
> Section 3.2.2:
> 
>    http_URL = "http:" "//" host [ ":" port ] [ abs_path [ "?" query ]]
> 
> You then have to refer back to RFC 2396 -- coincidentally also section 
> 3.2.2 of that RFC -- for the definitions of the component parts "host" 
> and "port" ("abs_path", etc are irrelevant to this discussion and 
> defined in other sections of 2396).
> 
> There you will see that "host" is a sub-part of the "hostport" part of 
> the "server" component of generic URIs:
> 
>    server        = [ [ userinfo "@" ] hostport ]
> 
>    hostport      = host [ ":" port ]
> 
> and, most importantly, you should note that the "userinfo" part is 
> _outside_ the definition of "hostport", and thus outside the "host" 
> part.  Ergo, HTTP URLs are explicitly (and presumably deliberately) 
> defined to _NOT_ support "userinfo" data so any implementation that 
> does is non-compliant.

Following the same reasoning, the HTTP URLs are also "deliberately" defined
to not support port numbers. I fail to believe that this was intentional.

-Guido

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