 HTML Slasher is a software program
that finds backslashes in URLs of HTML files and corrects
them to slashes. How important is this? If the URLs of links, images and
other inline media in your Web pages incorrectly use
backslashes in the paths, about a third of your potential
visitors are unable to properly access your site! How
could this happen to me? It might surprise you, but one of
the newest, most popular Web authoring tools for
beginning to intermediate Web page authors is responsible.
Read on for the rest of the story... |
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The Problem with Backslashes Internet
URLs use the Unix way of specifying file paths,
separating the directory names with slashes "/"
(sometimes referred to as forward slashes). Backslashes
"\", common to DOS and Windows systems, should
not be used in URLs. The backslash is classified as an unsafe
character.Problems for Browsers You
can test a Web page with URL backslashes in Microsoft
Internet Explorer and it will work fine, so what's the
problem? To put it simply, Internet Explorer is a lot
less picky about URL syntax than other browsers, and can
cope with backslashes. Netscape Communicator (Navigator)
and most other browsers display "broken" images
and "Error 404 - Not Found" messages when they
encounter a backslash in a path. This means that pages
with backslashes in the URLs can not be properly accessed
by about 30-35% of their potential visitors. Click
here for a demonstration.How Backslashes get into your Web Page Microsoft
Word 2000 has a dangerous habit of formatting URLs in
links, image and other paths with backslashes instead of
slashes. Knowing Web authors who use Word 2000 have been
painstakingly correcting these pages with another editor
before publishing them. But to make matters worse,
whenever a file is re-edited in Word 2000, it reformats
the corrected URLs back into backslashes! There are other
sources as well. Authors who are used to typing paths in
DOS and Windows environments sometimes enter backslashes
in URLs inadvertently.How Backslashes get missed When
developing a page offline in Windows, most HTML authoring
and editing programs never notice the mistake because
they can load media properly from paths with either
slashes or backslashes. Most Validators and Link Checkers
miss this problem. Even Netscape does not have a problem
with backslashes in offline pages. The problem will
surface only after the page is published on a Web server,
so the author is usually caught totally unaware.The Solution Until
now, the only option was to use a second editor (such as
Wordpad) to search and replace these unwanted backslashes.
That is a lot of work, since you can't just do a global
search and replace. There are many backslashes found in
headers and style sheets that have nothing to do with
URLs.HTML Slasher is the easiest software solution to find and repair backslashes in URLs. Drop in the HTML files, hit the repair button, and it's done. HTML Slasher repairs URLs in 32 different HTML tag and attribute values. |
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