59456 - Mozilla Escapes Quotation Marks and Breaks Some Interactive Web Sites

Status: RESOLVED INVALID

(Core :: Layout: Form Controls, defect, P3)

Description

[Evan DiBiase]

To quote Dylan Griffiths <[e-mail]>: "M18 has a bug where it
decides to helpfully escape quotation marks, rendering anything involving them
(a href, etc) useless." What I know about it, basically, is that when I enter
tags into posts on kuro5hin.org that include tags like <blockquote type="cite">,
Kuro5hin doesn't receieve them correctly (apparently because Mozilla is escaping
the quotation marks) and, therefore, doesn't format things correctly. I don't
know how many other sites this is going on in, but certainly isn't behavior that
I would consider standard. Hopefully this gets fixed soon so I can use Mozilla
to use Kuro5hin (and other sites that may be affected).

Comment 1

[dylang]

I think the behaviour has to do with how Mozilla interprets & and other
things.  Kuro5hin.org's Scoop code is designed to escape amphersands and other
entities in order to work around the Netscape and IE behaviour of rendering the
character entities put in the text box by the server during a preview operation.

Examples: if you have ' <rant> I hate the world </rant> ' Scoop will check that
the 'rant' tag is not an allowed HTML tag, escape the greater than/less than
symbols to &lt; and &gt;, and output it in the preview box as ' &lt;rant&gt;
...' .. the browser then typically renders the entities into the characters they
represent.  The other behaviour is that of escaping amphersands.  "John & Tom"
will put put "John &amp; Tom" into the preview box for Netscape/IE to display as
"John & Tom"

This allows Scoop to safely escape things like C code, free form text, etc.  It
also seems to lead to a problem with Mozilla as Mozilla seems to be trying to
'help' people work around the server side problem by 'fixing' the client side
handling of the code.

Slashdot, for comparative example, does not escape things between preview
operations (leading to silent loss of a posters data).

Comment 2

[sefreeman]

*** This bug has been confirmed by popular vote. ***

Comment 3

[Evan DiBiase]

rusty over at kuro5hin.org is indicating that this was a Scoop bug, and not a
Mozilla bug. Furthermore, Mozilla is the only browser doing things _correctly_,
so kudos to the team :)

Comment 4

[Ilya Gulko]

Is this one of those "everyone else is off key" situations? I understand what 
the problem is, and it seems like Mozilla is trying to outsmart the user. Think 
about it... if an ampersand be displayed, shouldn't an ampersand also be 
submitted? If the current behavior is kept, then there will be a lot of problem 
with sites that don't take this into consideration. Does anyone know what the 
W3C is saying about this?