223761 - HTML comments in bookmarks.html are interpreted

Status: RESOLVED EXPIRED

(SeaMonkey :: Bookmarks & History, defect)

Description

[Matthias Buecher]

User-Agent:       Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US; rv:1.4) Gecko/20030624
Build Identifier: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US; rv:1.4) Gecko/20030624

Due to a hd problem I had to edit the bookmarks.html file manually, as parts of
the bookmarks.html were destroyed. (Yeah, I read the first lines that I
shouldn't edit it manually).
Did a backup of that bookmarks file, created another copy for modifying and
tested the modified version by copying it back to my Mozilla user directory.
While testing I wanted to uncomment some lines, eg. <!-- </DL> --> and wondered
that the bookmark structure didn't changed.
Later I found out that the bookmark module interprets the code within a html
comment, so I had to delete those lines after copying to the user directory.
As the bookmarkt content type is text/html it should also handle html comments
like in a html page.

Reproducible: Always

Steps to Reproduce:
1. Close all Mozilla sessions
2. Do a backup of bookmarks.html
3. Put a <!-- </DL> --> somewhere inside your bookmarks.html, save
3. Restart Mozilla and see the destroyed folder structure of your bookmarks

Actual Results:  
The destroyed bookmarks are saved when closing Mozilla. Then all bookmarks are
lost that dropped out of the structure :(

Expected Results:  
Ignore the html comment as the content type text/html indicates

Please check the Firebird project for this bug too.

Comment 1

[Dave]

I did not try to reproduce this.  But...
Some relevant observations:

1) As in Bug 66116:  the file is not only something not to be edited manually;
but technically not even an HTML document.  The doctype is <!DOCTYPE
NETSCAPE-Bookmark-file-1> ...

2) On the other hand, the argument could just as well be made that since 113821
(to make bookmarks more "surfable") is supposed to be fixed, that the above
argument may not apply.  Maybe the real solution is to switch to a proper HTML
formatted bookmarks file (not to be confused with actually changing the
character of the NETSCAPE-Bookmark-file-1 doctype).  But I doubt this will occur.

In the end, I guess that whatever else happens, someone will come along and mark
this wontfix, and confirm that editing the bookmarks.html file by hand is
at-your-own-risk.

Comment 2

[Gervase Markham [:gerv]]

This is an automated message, with ID "auto-resolve01".

This bug has had no comments for a long time. Statistically, we have found that
bug reports that have not been confirmed by a second user after three months are
highly unlikely to be the source of a fix to the code.

While your input is very important to us, our resources are limited and so we
are asking for your help in focussing our efforts. If you can still reproduce
this problem in the latest version of the product (see below for how to obtain a
copy) or, for feature requests, if it's not present in the latest version and
you still believe we should implement it, please visit the URL of this bug
(given at the top of this mail) and add a comment to that effect, giving more
reproduction information if you have it.

If it is not a problem any longer, you need take no action. If this bug is not
changed in any way in the next two weeks, it will be automatically resolved.
Thank you for your help in this matter.

The latest beta releases can be obtained from:
Firefox:     http://www.mozilla.org/projects/firefox/
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Comment 3

[Gervase Markham [:gerv]]

This bug has been automatically resolved after a period of inactivity (see above
comment). If anyone thinks this is incorrect, they should feel free to reopen it.