Marteladas

Posted on Jan 24, 2006

“Martelada” is the Portuguese word for what browser engines have to do to deal with the Web. The Web is broken in ways no one can imagine. I recently got involved in writing a small program to clone web pages and had to deal with rudimentary manual html parsing. Did you knew that:

Yahoo!’s Homepage refers to URLs in anchors without parenthesis or apostrophes just to spare a few bytes (and then they have a huge 30k banner at the same time) in the form ?
Saw this on Slashdot. Instead of http://poke.w3.org/ you can just link to //poke.w3.org and your browser will understand that //=http:// ? Will work with parenthesis, apostrophes or nothing.
In Javascript or CSS (a newly created standard) you can easily see url(” url(‘ or url(//this.works.com and they all work, apparently.

This may be common sense to any HTML parser developer or experienced web designer, but I was kind of shocked. And I’m sure there’s hundreds more.