Over the past few weeks we've been experimenting with different rules for handling space characters in URLs. Technically, spaces are not allowed in URLs; they should be encoded as %20. Nevertheless, many websites use spaces in file names.
We looked at treatment of spaces in common browsers. In every case browsers translate interior spaces to %20. The treatment of leading and trailing spaces varies. The most forgiving behavior is to remove them. Thus we now remove leading/trailing spaces, but keep interior spaces. Here are a couple of examples to illustrate:
<a href=" leadingSpace.html"> is treated as <a href="leadingSpace.html">
While
<a href="interior Space.html"> becomes <a href="interior%20Space.html">
