An odd situation...redirecting to Microsoft?
I was adding a couple links to my other site and found out something new. New to me in any case.
I had accidentally entered the link in the HTML as http://http://www.gutenberg.org when I did a page preview and clicked the link it took me to Microsoft's website. Now Project Gutenberg doesn't have much to do with the software company in Redmond...
When I was looking over the code again I realized my mistake. But why does it redirect to MS? I booted up SLAX and tried it in Konqueror and it says "An error occurred while loading..." etc.
posted by Daniel | 11:50 AM
2 Comments:
I was curious about this, too: there's something insulting about typing an erroneous double-syntax line and suddenly redirecting to MS, especially on a Linux box.
Turns out, it's a Firefox thing: typing http://http://whatever is parsed so that nothing after the second colon is recognized; Firefox knows that it's a bad link, and it also knows that without a TLD attached to a domain name (presumably, in this case, "http" missing a ".com" or some such), it can't load that link.
Protocol in Firefox does an "I'm Feeling Lucky" Google search and loads that page when it can't figure out what's going on.
Hence, when you type the HTTP protocol spec twice, it looks like to Firefox you just typed "http" in the address field; it Googles your "query," and takes you to the first page.
Try it yourself: go to Google and type in "http". First hit: MS. How unfortunate.
Talk about incentive for making sure all your links are correct!
[I saw your post on Sooz's blog and thought I'd check your blog out! (BTW, thanks for reading ThinkBlog!)]
I didn't realize that's what was going on...Thanks for the tip. And yeah...I've been checking out ThinkBlog. Quite interesting.
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