After I read this, I started to look at the Wikipedia article on Base64 and eventually got to the article for the data URI scheme. That's where I found a sentence that seems to a little bit at odds with the blogpost. The Wikipedia article mentions that "whitespace characters are not permitted in data URIs".
But then I suppose it goes back to the main thrust of the blogpost because it says that in the context of HTML 4 and 5, that linefeeds within an attribute value are ignored. So possibly there are some other contexts where whitespace might not be ignored.
- Everyone of them gives me a 404, can you kindly add some page on your blog form where I can just see the titles of all the articles quickly?
- Most blogs posted on HN are not user friendly in this regard, sometimes the reader wants a quick glimpse of everything on 1 page so that they can quickly pick interesting stuff
Somewhat relatedly, GitHub Pages does support using URL-encoded newline characters %0A to reference file names with newlines,[0] but GitHub itself will omit the file from the web UI's tree view.
He had a blog post that seemed just weird and out of left field. Like it was clearly a response to something but what? What was the motivation for it?
When asked he said y'know. He just thinks about stuff and writes and that's what he does.
Turns out the blog post was a post he also made on social media. And said post was a response to something. And I guess he thought it was pretty good writing and should go on his blog, too.
Nothing wrong with that on it's own but I feel like most people would preface a post like that with "I saw this thing." And when directly asked like... He just straight up lied?
This sort of thing is sometimes used in so-called "scriptless xss" attacks, where if you can force the website to have an unclosed url, you can capture part of the page contents (hopefully containing secrets) and exfiltrate it.
You’re a braver coder than me if you trade off potential errors in a massive pipeline of browsers, DNS, cache servers and proxies just so your code looks a bit neater! (EDIT: But this is a welcome, interesting post, just to be clear!)
20 comments
[ 3.2 ms ] story [ 50.0 ms ] threadthe title is referring to inside html attributes, where they will be removed hence not affect where the link points.
But then I suppose it goes back to the main thrust of the blogpost because it says that in the context of HTML 4 and 5, that linefeeds within an attribute value are ignored. So possibly there are some other contexts where whitespace might not be ignored.
- https://lemire.me/posts
- https://lemire.me/archive
- https://lemire.me/archives
- Everyone of them gives me a 404, can you kindly add some page on your blog form where I can just see the titles of all the articles quickly?
- Most blogs posted on HN are not user friendly in this regard, sometimes the reader wants a quick glimpse of everything on 1 page so that they can quickly pick interesting stuff
“You got URLs in my new lines!”
[0]: https://sheeptester.github.io/hello-world/test/%20%0A%20%0A/...
He had a blog post that seemed just weird and out of left field. Like it was clearly a response to something but what? What was the motivation for it?
When asked he said y'know. He just thinks about stuff and writes and that's what he does.
Turns out the blog post was a post he also made on social media. And said post was a response to something. And I guess he thought it was pretty good writing and should go on his blog, too.
Nothing wrong with that on it's own but I feel like most people would preface a post like that with "I saw this thing." And when directly asked like... He just straight up lied?
That whole thing just rubbed me the wrong way.
For full context https://lemire.me/blog/2025/10/17/research-results-are-cultu...
In the comments I turned into kind of a dick. I was pretty upset about being lied to.
Anyways between that and articles like this that are honestly useless and kinda misleading - I'm not really the biggest fan.
Still, not a bright idea.
To the point where chrome stopped allowing newlines in some circumstances https://chromestatus.com/feature/5735596811091968
That is not the right mindset to create good things. If it's an error, it's not fine.