271464 - Bookmark Names Altered

Status: RESOLVED DUPLICATE of bug 245758

(SeaMonkey :: Bookmarks & History, defect)

Description

[David E. Ross]

User-Agent:       Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Win98; en-US; rv:1.7.3) Gecko/20040910
Build Identifier: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Win98; en-US; rv:1.8a5) Gecko/20041122

I temporarily installed Mozilla 1.8a5 to test a bug fix.  While it was
installed, I did not open Bookmark Manager.  After I reinstalled Mozilla 1.7.3,
I discovered that all my bookmarks that had apostrophes in the bookmark names
had been altered.  The apostrophes were replaced with '.  This does not
display correctly either from the menu, in the Bookmark Manager window, or when
I view my bookmarks in my browser window.  

I have more than one Mozilla profile.  This affected all of them.  

Reproducible: Always
Steps to Reproduce:




It's bad enough that my bookmarks file was changed when I did not want it
changed.  It's worse when the change results in an incorrect character.  

I consider this REGRESSION as something that did work before no longer works
correctly.

Comment 1

[David E. Ross]

Correction:  I used Wordpad to view my bookmarks file.  The apostrophes were
changed to &39; and not &39;.  The & is correctly displayed as & by the
three different methods of viewing the file.  

Any character conversion here is an error because an apostrophe (') has always
been a valid character in a bookmark name, which is merely a string of
characters.  It is a valid character in the text of a TITLE element of HTML
4.01, from which Mozilla sets the name of a bookmark.  

Comment 2

[David E. Ross]

More information:
This problem only affected the two profiles that I used.  A third profile that I
did not use with 1.8a5 remained unaffected.  

The two affected profiles each use its bookmark file as its home page.  Other
than  the automatic update of the "Last Visited" field of bookmarks, neither
bookmark file was updated.  The problem affected all bookmarks in each of the
two profiles, including those that were not visited.  

Comment 3

[Hermann Schwab]

Bug 245758  	Persisting bookmarks file converts ' to ' in bookmark title
(apostrophe, lsquo, entity)

Comment 4

[David E. Ross]

Re comment #3:  

Bug 245758 was marked RESOLVED 2004-06-11, well before creating 1.8a5.  If the
final fix that bug is to alter apostrophes in bookmark names, it's just plain
wrong.  Apostrophes are legal characters in the text of the <TITLE> element,
from which the bookmark names are initially created.  They should not be altered.  

Among other things, the alteration adversely impacts the ability to display
bookmark files as Web pages, something that a number of users do.  Indeed,
comments on a recent survey indicate that a number of users specify their
bookmark files as their home pages.  Attempts to search the Web display of a
bookmark file are broken if the search is for an apostrophe and are confounded
if the search is for an ampersand, semicolon, or the number 39 without intending
to search for an apostrophe.  This is an anti-user change.  

Comment 5

[David E. Ross]

Further analysis based on 
Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Win98; en-US; rv:1.7.3) Gecko/20040910

Contrary to statements in bug 245758, I have not seen this problem in any 1.7.x.
 I just now completed the following test.  
1.  I located a bookmark that has an apostrophe in its name, derived from the
<TITLE> element not from my manually changing the name.  The URL is
<http://www.olaweb.org/toolkit.shtml>.  
2.  After saving the URL, I deleted the bookmark using Bookmark Manager.  
3.  I terminated Mozilla and then restarted it.  
4.  I went to the saved URL.  
5.  After opening Bookmark Manager, I inserted a bookmark for the URL by
dragging from the address area into the Bookmark Manager window.  
6.  I closed Bookmark Manager, terminated Mozilla, and then restarted Mozilla.  

Even after revisiting <http://www.olaweb.org/toolkit.shtml> by selecting it from
my bookmarks, the apostrophe in the name was not altered.  I confirmed this by
viewing my bookmarks file via Wordpad.  

Thus, this problem appears unique to 1.8 (definitely in 1.8a5).  

Comment 6

[Stefan Borggraefe]

David: Please read comments 49, 50 and then comment 3 in bug 245758. The fix
that is mentioned in comment 50 will be in Mozilla 1.7.5. So switching between
newer trunk builds and 1.7.5 shouldn't cause this error. Sadly switching between
trunk and 1.7.3 does. :-(

*** This bug has been marked as a duplicate of 245758 ***

Comment 7

[David E. Ross]

This may be fixed in 1.7.5 (which is not yet available to end users) through bug
245758.  However, this bug was written against 1.8a5 (on a different branch),
where I see no action to fix it.  Since bug 245758 is reported as FIXED, this
bug should remain open until a 1.8 fix can be verified.  

Comment 8

[Stefan Borggraefe]

The bug you are seeing happens because (In reply to comment #7)
> This may be fixed in 1.7.5 (which is not yet available to end users) through bug
> 245758.

You could test this with a 1.7-branch nightly build from
http://ftp.mozilla.org/pub/mozilla.org/mozilla/nightly/latest-1.7/.

> However, this bug was written against 1.8a5 (on a different branch),
> where I see no action to fix it.

This bug is about an error that happens when you're switching between 1.7.3 and
newer trunk builds. This is identical to bug 245758 comment 49 and 50. The cause
for this is that a the fix for bug 245758 was not part of 1.7.3, but already
checked in to the trunk.

Now that the fix for bug 245758 is also part of the 1.7-branch, this bug
shouldn't happen anymore.

See also the other bugs that were already duped against bug 245758.

*** This bug has been marked as a duplicate of 245758 ***