Closed Bug 166765 Opened 22 years ago Closed 14 years ago

Composer should make (or offer) all links use FQDNs rather than hostnames

Categories

(SeaMonkey :: Composer, defect)

defect
Not set
normal

Tracking

(Not tracked)

RESOLVED EXPIRED

People

(Reporter: benc, Unassigned)

References

Details

(Keywords: helpwanted)

People have a tendency to create links with just a hostname, and not a fully
qualified domain name.

This is mostly due to laziness (who wants to type your default domain all day
long?), but also because the browser doesn't really encourage the use of FQDN's
when it should.

This is a problem because it creates a lot of content that is inherently
ambiguous, especially if documents are very old, network configs change, or the
content is sent in email. I can't tell you how many times I've received email
with an in-line image created in composer that is broken because I'm not using
the default domain the sender thought I did.

The root of this problem is that the responsibility of composing clear,
unambigous content is the job of the compsing human, but in this area, our
software needs to support them in that role.

Here's the response I got from one person who I have asked several times to make
their email use FQDN's for inline content. Recently they sent an email that had
a link w/ text that had a hostname.domain, but the actual HREF still had just a
hostname.

"I understand your frustration, however, I see this as a composer problem, not a
sender problem.  I will try and fix the issues as I see them, however, don't
expect it to be fixed every time.
The other solution is I can revert back to 4.7 were the issue does not exist.
"

Apparently, I'm not the first person that thought of this either, RFC 2396 says
that:
"   To actually be "Uniform" as a resource locator, a URL hostname should
   be a fully qualified domain name.  In practice, however, the host
   component may be a local domain literal."

http://www.faqs.org/rfcs/rfc2396.html

This probably did not create many problems before the advent of DSL or VPNs,
because a computer was basically always on the same network, with the same
default domain. These days, that isn't the case. You could put every default
domain you access into the serach domain list, but you would end up with
potentially slow and ineffecient DNS resolution. Mozilla should implement a
profile-level default domain (add a domain string to single hostnames, bug
88217). That would mask the effects of not fixing this bug, but thinking from
just the composer perspective, this is a good idea.

Before anyone else comments, glancing through bug 88217 wouuld be a good idea,
because a lot of relevant discussion (and objections) are covered there.
+nsbeta1

Would fixing this affect mailnews composer windows? That is where a lot of the
really bad content comes from.
Keywords: nsbeta1
OS: Windows 98 → All
Hardware: PC → All
This would be awesome -- maybe we could help train internal people not to use
unqualified links that don't work over SERA.  Not sure how hard it would be to
do, and probably not an official priority, but I'd love to see a patch that
implemented it!
Keywords: nsbeta1helpwanted, nsbeta1-
+nsdogfood. Lisa actually sent out a note telling people to get this right b/c
it also breaks links from people on our network, in other default domains.

+4xp, the email I enclosed in the initial problem said this doesn't happen in Comm4.

akkana: do you want to do FQDN patrol for next year? I think I've had my fill of it.
Depends on: 88217
Keywords: 4xp, nsdogfood
Status: NEW → ASSIGNED
reassign to new placeholder
Assignee: syd → composer
Status: ASSIGNED → NEW
Product: Browser → Seamonkey
Assignee: composer → nobody
QA Contact: sujay → composer
MASS-CHANGE:
This bug report is registered in the SeaMonkey product, but has been without a comment since the inception of the SeaMonkey project. This means that it was logged against the old Mozilla suite and we cannot determine that it's still valid for the current SeaMonkey suite. Because of this, we are setting it to an UNCONFIRMED state.

If you can confirm that this report still applies to current SeaMonkey 2.x nightly builds, please set it back to the NEW state along with a comment on how you reproduced it on what Build ID, or if it's an enhancement request, why it's still worth implementing and in what way.
If you can confirm that the report doesn't apply to current SeaMonkey 2.x nightly builds, please set it to the appropriate RESOLVED state (WORKSFORME, INVALID, WONTFIX, or similar).
If no action happens within the next few months, we move this bug report to an EXPIRED state.

Query tag for this change: mass-UNCONFIRM-20090614
Status: NEW → UNCONFIRMED
MASS-CHANGE:
This bug report is registered in the SeaMonkey product, but still has no comment since the inception of the SeaMonkey project 5 years ago.

Because of this, we're resolving the bug as EXPIRED.

If you still can reproduce the bug on SeaMonkey 2 or otherwise think it's still valid, please REOPEN it and if it is a platform or toolkit issue, move it to the according component.

Query tag for this change: EXPIRED-20100420
Status: UNCONFIRMED → RESOLVED
Closed: 14 years ago
Resolution: --- → EXPIRED
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