1661726 - Feed will not subscribe if subscribe page title is empty

Status: RESOLVED WONTFIX

(MailNews Core :: Feed Reader, defect, P5)

Description

[Rainer Bielefeld]

My observations with with installation of unofficial (by wg9s) De SeaMonkey 2.53.5 beta 1 pre Mozilla/5.0 (NT 6.1; Win64; x64; rv:60.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/60.0 Build 20200727210001 (Default Classic Theme) on German WIN7 64bit (no longer reproducible because test page https://www.oepnvbs.de/feed/ has changed (taken to here from NG mozilla.support.seamonkey):

on https://www.oepnvbs.de/ I observe a problem with subscribing to a feed.

1. Kommentar-Feed

Comment feed works, click on the feed symbol and selecting "Kommentar-Feed" subscribes to feed, it appears in Feed List with name "Kommentare für". That's an unintuitive name, but it works.
Strange: I have been used to see a list of entries and a button [Subscribe] which needs to be clicked to subscribe, that one ismissing here.

2. Posting Feed

Click on the feed symbol and selecting "Feed" does not subscribe to feed, I get message "https://www.oepnvbs.de/feed/ is not a valid feed". I believe that that worked 1 time this morning, but may be I made a mistake?
Strange: I have been used to see a list of entries and a button [Subscribe] which needs to be clicked to subscribe, that one ismissing here.

Comparison with other feed readers:

WINDOWS standalone feed reader QuietRSS subscribes to both feeds and lists plausible number of entries

blogtrottr.com is able to subscribe to both feeds, because of hourly update I will have to wait for results. Here the Posting feed is listed as "(Untitled feed)"

My suspect

May be that missing title causes the problem for SeaMonkey?

Latest

This afternoon Page contents has changed. Now we have

"<title>ÖPNV Braunschweig</title>"    

instead of

"<title></title>"

on https://www.oepnvbs.de/feed/ in source code. And now subscribing works fine.

So it's no longer possible to do tests with that website.

Additional Info

a) No obvious DUP found with this query

Comment 1

[Mark]

Attachment: Test RSS feed examples

As Rainer notes, the original feed at https://www.oepnvbs.de/feed/ has been updated to include a title, so can no longer be used to reproduce. Earlier, when it still had an empty title, I was able to reproduce the failure to add that feed, although without any error message in my case (SeaMonkey 2.53.3 from Ubuntuzilla on Linux Mint - Ubuntuzilla provides an apt repository packaging the official versions).

I've constructed some examples to reproduce, based on an example from Wikipedia. I'm currently hosting these for convenience, but also attached in case I remove them from my host at some point. (SeaMonkey doesn't handle them as RSS feeds just opening them from local files; I guess it relies on the Content-Type header returned by a proper web server).

Examples are:

• http://www.bourne.me.uk/2020-08-28-Test-SeaMonkey-Bug1661726/test.rss: Includes both title and description elements; SeaMonkey successfully adds this to Mail & News, using the title as the folder name
• http://www.bourne.me.uk/2020-08-28-Test-SeaMonkey-Bug1661726/test-empty-title.rss: The title element is present but empty; SeaMonkey also successfully adds this to Mail & News, using the description as the folder name
• http://www.bourne.me.uk/2020-08-28-Test-SeaMonkey-Bug1661726/test-empty-title-empty-description.rss: The title and description elements are both present but empty; SeaMonkey fails to add this one to Mail & News (it opens Mail & News, and creates a "Blogs & News Feeds" account if not already present, but does not add a folder for this feed)

I do not see the "...is not a valid feed" message Rainer reports - just no folder appears. Maybe that's an improvement in SeaMonkey 2.53.5 from wg9s, over my 2.53.3 from Ubuntuzilla.

I don't know much about the detail of RSS. From a quick look at the spec at https://www.rssboard.org/rss-2-0#requiredChannelElements, it looks like title and description elements are required. So a feed which is completely missing either element would indeed be invalid. I'm not sure from that how empty elements should be handled - it could be claimed that requiring the elements implies that a value within the element should also be required.

Comment 2

[Mark]

(In reply to Mark from comment #1)

Created attachment 9172782 [details]
Test RSS feed examples

As Rainer notes, the original feed at https://www.oepnvbs.de/feed/ has been updated to include a title, so can no longer be used to reproduce. Earlier, when it still had an empty title, I was able to reproduce the failure to add that feed, although without any error message in my case (SeaMonkey 2.53.3 from Ubuntuzilla on Linux Mint - Ubuntuzilla provides an apt repository packaging the official versions).

I've constructed some examples to reproduce, based on an example from Wikipedia. I'm currently hosting these for convenience, but also attached in case I remove them from my host at some point. (SeaMonkey doesn't handle them as RSS feeds just opening them from local files; I guess it relies on the Content-Type header returned by a proper web server).

Examples are:

• test.rss: Includes both title and description elements; SeaMonkey successfully adds this to Mail & News, using the title as the folder name
• test-empty-title.rss: The title element is present but empty; SeaMonkey also successfully adds this to Mail & News, using the description as the folder name
• test-empty-title-empty-description.rss: The title and description elements are both present but empty; SeaMonkey fails to add this one to Mail & News (it opens Mail & News, and creates a "Blogs & News Feeds" account if not already present, but does not add a folder for this feed)

I do not see the "...is not a valid feed" message Rainer reports - just no folder appears. Maybe that's an improvement in SeaMonkey 2.53.5 from wg9s, over my 2.53.3 from Ubuntuzilla.

I don't know much about the detail of RSS. From a quick look at the spec at https://www.rssboard.org/rss-2-0#requiredChannelElements, it looks like title and description elements are required. So a feed which is completely missing either element would indeed be invalid. I'm not sure from that how empty elements should be handled - it could be claimed that requiring the elements implies that a value within the element should also be required.

Comment 3

[Mark]

(Sorry for the noise; I messed up the markdown links in the first version, and then thought I was editing my original reply rather than posting a new one!)

Comment 4

[Frank-Rainer Grahl (:frg)]

Therer is nothing you can create the description/Name from:
https://dxr.mozilla.org/comm-central/source/comm/mailnews/extensions/newsblog/content/feed-parser.js#117

Timestamp: 8/28/2020, 11:11:42 PM
Error: 2020-08-28 23:11:42 Feeds ERROR FeedParser.parseAsRSS2: missing mandatory element <title> and <description>, or <link>
Source File: resource:///modules/gloda/log4moz.js
Line: 680

For me this is a wontfix.

Comment 5

[Rainer Bielefeld]

(In reply to Frank-Rainer Grahl (:frg) from comment #4)

For me this is a wontfix.

Well, compared to the other 100,000 todos in SeaMonkey code this one has really low priority, currently I only know 1 single page affected by this problem, and the problem has been fixed at website.

On the other hand "integrated Feed Reader" is an unique characteristic of SM, and because of that the feature should be (page) error tolerant, especially because other feed readers are able to handle the problem by replacing missing title by part of page URL.

Comment 6

[Frank-Rainer Grahl (:frg)]

WaltS48 tested it in TB78.2.0. Does not work there either as I thought.
https://validator.w3.org/feed/check.cgi?url=http%3A//www.bourne.me.uk/2020-08-28-Test-SeaMonkey-Bug1661726/test-empty-title-empty-description.rss

I would close the bug as wontfix but in any case it is a core component.

Comment 7

[Rainer Bielefeld]

core component.

That's the best solution.

Comment 8

[Wayne Mery (:wsmwk)]

Such an issue was reported in the past, and fixed. So perhaps this is an actionable regression?

Comment 9

[alta88]

(In reply to Mark from comment #2)

I don't know much about the detail of RSS. From a quick look at the spec at https://www.rssboard.org/rss-2-0#requiredChannelElements, it looks like title and description elements are required. So a feed which is completely missing either element would indeed be invalid. I'm not sure from that how empty elements should be handled - it could be claimed that requiring the elements implies that a value within the element should also be required.

They are indeed required, regardless of what any other non spec conforming workarounds other feed applications are forced to implement. The error console even states this. There is no regression.