251845 - livemark feeds with incorrect encoding get displayed as garbage in menus

Status: RESOLVED WONTFIX

(Firefox :: Bookmarks & History, defect)

Description

[Sekundes]

User-Agent:       Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.0; en-US; rv:1.7) Gecko/20040712 Firefox/0.9.1+
Build Identifier: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.0; en-US; rv:1.7) Gecko/20040712 Firefox/0.9.1+

In the real WWW nowadays, there're some kind of invalid feeds.
For most apparent one I've seen is the non-UTF-8 feeds which doesn't specify any
encoding information.
It should be returned fatal errors per bug 174351.
But it doesn't in the current Gecko engine.
So those invalid feeds are parsed completely and I raise another usable problem
that displayed incorrectly in menus when using livemark feature.
It really gives the bad impression for end-users that the support of livemark is
poor IMO.
I wanna ask what do the developer think about this issue...

Reproducible: Always
Steps to Reproduce:
1. Add URL on the above as livemark.
2. The menu of livemark does not displayed correctly due to invalid feeds.

Comment 1

[Vladimir Vukicevic [:vlad] [:vladv] (needinfo me, slow to respond)]

Even though the menu contents display as garbage, the menu itself still displays
correctly; there is no menu "corruption" or somesuch going on.  end-users
viewing this (and similar) will see the garbage themselves in any rss reading
app, unless they explicitly override the encoding.  If they explicitly override
the encoding, they'll realize what's going on in the livemark menus, otherwise
it'll be garbage everywhere.

This almost certainly shouldn't block 1.0; however, it would be nice to have bug
174351 fixed.

Comment 2

[Sekundes]

so could I nominate bug 174351 that blocks aviary1.0?
As the URL above is parsed into Big5 encoding automatically using a software 
named FeedDemon from Windows Platform.
I believe this issue would stumble most asian Firefox users.

Comment 3

[Markus Lindström]

There's a swedish newspaper which has its own RSS feed
(http://www.expressen.se/). It would seem the feed is encoded in ISO-8859-1, but
it shows in UTF-8 in the menus, thus I get that trademark <?> icon instead of
all non-ASCII characters (å, ä, and ö in this case, which are used throughout
the language ;-)).

I cannot find any workaround for this problem, which is aggravating, the feed is
basically rendered useless! I believe adding a live bookmark property such as
"force character encoding" would be useful in those cases...

I'll contact the newspaper and ask them if they can encode it in UTF-8, nonetheless.

Comment 4

[Vladimir Vukicevic [:vlad] [:vladv] (needinfo me, slow to respond)]

(In reply to comment #3)
> There's a swedish newspaper which has its own RSS feed
> (http://www.expressen.se/). It would seem the feed is encoded in ISO-8859-1, but
> it shows in UTF-8 in the menus, thus I get that trademark <?> icon instead of
> all non-ASCII characters (å, ä, and ö in this case, which are used throughout
> the language ;-)).

Markus, this is probably an instance of bug 253703 -- this bug refers to feeds
that explicitly specify a wrong encoding (or don't specify any encoding at all,
but are not UTF8 as xml defaults to).

Comment 5

[Anne (:annevk)]

Once bug 247024 is fixed, text/xml will default to US-ASCII. (Just for the record.)

Comment 6

[石庭豐 (Seak, Teng-Fong)]

I think changing OS to all is more appropriate and add intl as a keyword too.

Comment 7

[Bjørn S Tennøe]

theRegister has an RSS feed http://www.theregister.co.uk/excerpts.rss where italics show up as <em> and & shows up as &amp;. Is this the same bug?

Comment 8

[Mike Connor [:mconnor]]

sorry for bugspam, long-overdue mass reassign of ancient QA contact bugs, filter on "beltznerLovesGoats" to get rid of this mass change

Comment 9

[Marco Bonardo [:mak]]

apart the original feed that does not exist anymore, all other feeds work fine for me, theRegister issue with html tags is not related to this bug. If a feed is wrong server side should be fixed server side.

Comment 10

[Marco Bonardo [:mak]]

Not going to fix this, if a page is serving wrong content its not our fault.