77932 - Text <input> allows multiple lines to be pasted

Status: RESOLVED WONTFIX

(SeaMonkey :: UI Design, defect)

Description

[Scott Gifford (old account)]

From Bugzilla Helper:
User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux 2.2.17-14 i686; en-US; rv:0.8.1+)
Gecko/20010426
BuildID:    2001042608

The text <input> in the form on

    http://validator.w3.org/

will allow multiple lines to be pasted into it    

Reproducible: Always
Steps to Reproduce:
1. Visit http://validator.w3.org/
2. Hilight the text of all lines of the bulleted text
3. Middle-click (paste) into the Address: field


Actual Results:  The textbox contains multiple lines of text.  To see it,
hilight some of the text in the textbox, and move the mouse up or down to make
Mozilla autoscroll.

Expected Results:  Multiple lines shouldn't be in a plain old text <input>. 
Either the multiple lines should be joined together, or all lines after the
first should be ignored.

The reason this matters is that Mozilla doesn't provide an interface to seeing
the multiple lines of text that are there.  So if you inadvertently paste in
multiple lines, there's no way visually to tell that you've done so.  This may
also confuse some CGI scripts.

Comment 1

[Oliver Klee]

WFM on 2001042704 Win2k. Looks like a Linux only issue, adding pp keyword.

Comment 2

[Scott Gifford (old account)]

Looks like this might be related to bug 23485.

Comment 3

[Asa Dotzler [:asa]]

good find Scott.  That looks like your bug to me.  Marking a duplicate.  

*** This bug has been marked as a duplicate of 23485 ***

Comment 4

[Boris Zbarsky [:bzbarsky]]

*** Bug 137375 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***

Comment 5

[Boris Zbarsky [:bzbarsky]]

*** Bug 141853 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***

Comment 6

[Boris Zbarsky [:bzbarsky]]

*** Bug 187785 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***

Comment 7

[Boris Zbarsky [:bzbarsky]]

*** Bug 200300 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***

Comment 8

[Boris Zbarsky [:bzbarsky]]

Reopening.  Bug 23485 is urlbar-specific -- it could be fixed without fixing
this bug, really...  And then this bug would never get fixed.  On the other
hand, fixing this bug would definitely fix bug 23485

Comment 9

[Boris Zbarsky [:bzbarsky]]

apps, I think...

Comment 10

[Jeremy Sanders]

Still present in Firefox 0.8

Comment 11

[Hermann Schwab]

WFM Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Win98; en-US; rv:1.7b) Gecko/20040324
WFM Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Win98; en-US; rv:1.7b) Gecko/20040314 Firefox/0.8.0+

with a changing a pref in about:config

editor.singleLine.pasteNewlines user set integer 3

Comment 12

[logan]

*** Bug 242326 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***

Comment 13

[Jesse Ruderman]

*** Bug 236067 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***

Comment 14

[Phil Ringnalda (:philor)]

*** Bug 263136 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***

Comment 15

[Daniel Veditz [:dveditz]]

What is the "fix" here? Linux allows multiple line pastes into a single line
text field **deliberately**.

The fix would be to delete the special unix-only pref setting for
editor.singleLine.pasteNewlines

http://lxr.mozilla.org/mozilla/source/modules/libpref/src/init/all.js#1486

Since that was done on purpose I'm WONTFIXing this one.

Comment 16

[Jesse Ruderman]

I'm not happy with the decision to WONTFIX this bug.  There are single-line
textboxes other than the address bar where it's bad for security if you
unknowingly paste multiple lines.

Comment 17

[Scott Gifford]

Deliberately bad UI doesn't make it any less bad.

Right now there's no way to tell that you've pasted multiple lines into an edit
box, and it's extremely difficult to edit the text that's in there, since the
arrow keys don't work properly and there are no scroll bars.  Without any such
interface, this can easily lead to confusing errors and accidentally sending
information that you intend to keep private, and this effect is completely
undiscoverable for a new user.

I would think an acceptable interface would require at least a small scroll bar
along the side of the text box, and working arrow keys.  If this stays WONTFIX,
I can open up a bug for that.

But, unless somebody can think of a useful reason for this behavior, I suggest
that simply changing the default setting for editor.singleLine.pasteNewlines to
1 on Unix would be a much more reasonable fix.

Comment 18

[Phil Ringnalda (:philor)]

*** Bug 267165 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***

Comment 19

[Thijs Kinkhorst]

Noteworthy is that the HTML spec explicitly names a input with type="text" to be
*single line*. It also provides a separate inputbox for multiline text which is
of course <textarea>. I see no sense in marking this as WONTFIX while it
violates the HTML specification of this this form element.

It also creates inconsistent behaviour. I've tried other applications on my
Linux desktop and couldn't find one that accepts multiline input the way Mozilla
does.

Comment 20

[Frank Wein [:mcsmurf]]

*** Bug 283813 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***

Comment 21

[Ralf Vitasek]

*** Bug 343624 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***

Comment 22

[Kevin Brosnan]

*** Bug 359696 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***

Comment 23

[Vincent Lefevre]

I've just got caught by this problem:
1. I selected some text from a page in Firefox (I thought it was single-line, from what I could see, but...).
2. I pasted it in a single-line input (I could see *exactly* what I thought I had selected).
3. I submitted the form.
To my surprise, there was much more in the selection than I had thought. So, IMHO, this bug should be reopened. This is really a security problem. I'm not requesting that multi-line text should be forbidden in single-line inputs, but at least there should be some warning from Firefox (or some visual information).