138803 - Composer does not remember file name or site subdirectory

Status: NEW

(SeaMonkey :: Composer, enhancement)

Description

[TT]

From Bugzilla Helper:
User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (OS/2; U; Warp 4.5; en-US; rv:0.9.9+) Gecko/20020406
BuildID:    2002040616

When I visit this URL and press Ctrl-E, I can edit this page.  When I try to
publish it, Composer does not remember that the filename is called index.html or
that it needs to be published in the /dungeon-bats.org subdirectory, even though
I've edited this page before and specified that information last time I
published it.

The solution is to embed meta tags into the HTML that Composer can use when it
comes to publish this information.  HomePage Publisher for OS/2 does this, and
it embeds tags like these (taken from http://tabi.org/timur/crystalos2.html):

<meta name="hpp-href" content="http://www.tabi.org/timur/">
<meta name="hpp-publishing-dir" content="/website/users/tabi/www/timur">

These tags are very helpful.  All of the private information, like passwords, is
stored on the local machine (Composer stores this information on page 2 of the
Publish As... dialog box).  But the page-specific information is stored in the
page itself.

If Composer could implement this feature, it would make publishing much easier,
especially when editing files whose filename cannot be determined from the URL
alone (like index.html).

Reproducible: Always
Steps to Reproduce:
Edit the home page of any web site, make changes, and publish.  Then try to edit
it again.  Before you can publish, you'll need to enter the filename and the
directory again.

Comment 1

[sujay]

--> cmanske

Comment 2

[michael wendell]

I am not able to reproduce this problem on the 04-21 1.0.0 branch build. 

Timur, can you try a more recent build, and see if the problem has cleared
itself up?

Comment 3

[Kathleen :Brade]

The complaint about not knowing the file is "index.html" when it is unspecified
is not easily remedied.  Is there a meta tag that HomePage Publisher uses for
filename?

As for the site, you can change the settings for the site to use whatever host
and subdirectories you want.  Can you clarify what your Composer publishing
settings are?  Are these changing after you publish?

I'm not a big fan of adding lots of meta tags to users' files (especially if
there is no industry standard).

Comment 4

[Charles Manske]

Nice suggestions for future enhancements.

Comment 5

[TT]

The previous web site no longer exists, so I'm changing it to my web site.

Also, I don't use HPP any more, and it's a dead product anyway.

The problem does still exist.  If you edit the home page of a particular site, Composer doesn't know what the filename is.  Technically, I suppose there is no automatic way to determine this, since the web server will provide whatever it wants when the browser requests "/", and it may not necessarily be a specific file anyway.  That's why I'm saying the meta tags are useful, but I admit this will only work for web pages that have been created by Composer.

In summary, the enhancement is this:

1) "Page Properties" should have a new entry, labeled "File name".  The default is one of the following:
   a) The value of some Composer-specific meta tag.
   b) If no meta tag, glean the filename from the URL itself
   c) If that's not possible, whatever the user specifies in a Save As operation.

2) Whenever the edited page is saved, the meta-tag should be specified with the file name as determined from the previous step.  Obviously, this feature should be optional, but I think the default should be to enable this feature.