29080 - Visited links @ Deja.com don't change color

Status: VERIFIED DUPLICATE of bug 12493

(Core :: DOM: Navigation, defect, P5)

Description

[scott]

If you do a search at Deja.com, click on one of the results, then click the back
button, the followed link does not change color.

Nor does it do so in Commmunicator 4.72.  Works fine in IE5.  This is probably a
dupe but I couldn't find anything.

Comment 1

[Sean Richardson]

After typing "Pretty Park" into the Quick Search box at http://www.deja.com/
the links turned to the visited colour after visiting a page and going back,
using the 2000-02-24-08-M14 nightly binary.

Code snippet from that page:
----------
<b>gt;gt; <a href="rate/item.xp?CID=11675&PDID=16009">Dorney Park & Wildwater 
Kingdom</a></b> <span class="small">in <a 
href="rate/list_items.xp?CID=11675&PCID=11524">U.S. Amusement Parks</a></span>
----------

[e-mail], what build of Mozilla were you using? M13 or a later
binary (the build ID appears at the right-hand end of the status bar at the
bottom of the browser window)

A similar bug about the same issue on a cnet page was marked WONTFIX due to
4.x not doing any better with bad nesting of tags, but that does not seem
to be the case here.

Comment 2

[scott]

I was using a post-M13 nightly.  Still happening as of build 2000022716.  I'm on
NT4 (SP6) with a 3Dfx Velocity 100 AGP video card.

Visited links on other sites changing color just fine.

Comment 3

[Doron Rosenberg (IBM)]

i'm seeing a link color change only where css is not defined - example, where it
says "Click here to see how you can use the new and improved Deja.com to help
you buy with precision.", 'here' link changes colors.

Comment 4

[Ryan Massie]

Confirmed on my 98 machine too (Build 2000030516)
Happens on netscape.com too.

Bug 30607 is also very similar to this bug.

Comment 5

[harm]

I dont see visited link change color on any site. example www.mozilla.org
buildid 2000052313
linux 686 machine with gnome.

Comment 6

[Doron Rosenberg (IBM)]

I see them working on 200052208 win98 on the mozilla.org menu for example.

This smells like a dupe of 30607, unless this should be turned to a linux bug?
Assigning bug to owners of style system, not the browser-general people.

Can anyone on win98 reproduce this?

Comment 7

[Marc Attinasi]

This does not look like a dup of 30607, which is a bug that the history is not 
matching 
  http://www.foo.com with 
  http://www.foo.com/

Anyway, this is working on a fresh build for the Deja site - I tested a bunch of 
links and they are fine (Linux and WinNT).

Marking WORKSFORME

Comment 8

[harm]

Rechecked. OK.
Bug was gone when I removed ~/.mozilla before starting mozilla.
some old config stuff had messed up in time I guess.

Comment 9

[Doron Rosenberg (IBM)]

30607 is about 'Visited links in targets/anchors don't change colors'...anyways 
;)

Marking verified on win98. Reporter - deleting profile often does get rid of 
bugs. You should always do that before reporting.

Comment 10

[Blake Ross]

*** Bug 40837 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***

Comment 11

[scott]

No wonder no one responded to my new comments... Bugzilla ate them :)
Ok I'll try this again:

This is still broken, but I have more info for you.  It only happens (links
don't change color) if you do a Power Search.  If you do a normal search, they
change.  Here's the exact steps:

Go to <http://www.deja.com/>.  Click on "Search discussions", which takes you to
<http://www.deja.com/usenet/>.  Click on "Power Search", which takes you to <
http://www.deja.com/home_ps.shtml>.  Search on anything and get the results
page.  Click the back button.  Link hasn't changed color.

Works fine in Communicator 4.73 and IE5.  Still not working as of build
2000060120.  I think this should be reopened (I'd do it myself but I'm not sure
if that's kosher).

PS: I always delete my profile info, along with the entire Mozilla directory
structure and moz*.dat in the Windows directory, before I install a new build.

Comment 12

[Pierre Saslawsky]

It works for me. After doing a search, I click Back twice to come back to
http://www.deja.com/usenet/ and the "Power Search" link is shown as visited.

Comment 13

[scott]

Pierre:

Yes, THAT link works.  That's not what I'm talking about though.  I'm talking
about the links for the individual results for the search.  To reiterate:

Go to the Power Search page.  Type in "test" (or anything) and click on the
[Search] button.  You'll get a bunch of search results.  Click on any result.
Once the selected usenet post is up, click the [Back] button ONCE to return to
the list of search result.  The search result you followed will not have changed
to the followed-link color.

Comment 14

[Pierre Saslawsky]

Correct. Reopening.

Comment 15

[Pierre Saslawsky]

Reassigning to Chris Waterson. To reproduce:
- go to http://www.deja.com/home_ps.shtml
- enter "test" and click Search
- click on the Subject of any article
- when the page is loaded, click the Back button
==> the link you clicked on to display the article is not shown as visited

Comment 16

[Chris Waterson]

I think that the code in the anchor element is computing the correct URL, but it
looks like somebody in the front-end is URL escaping it. If you mouse over the
link, you'll see that the sqare brackets in the URL are maintained; however,
once you click on the URL, it escapes them to %5B. Somebody shouldn't be
escaping, here.

Comment 17

[David Baron :dbaron: (⌚️UTC-4, no longer working on Mozilla)]

Are square brackets valid characters in URLs?
http://info.internet.isi.edu/in-notes/rfc/files/rfc2396.txt makes me think not
(appendix A).  Should it be instead that the escaping should be done at a lower
level?

Comment 18

[Andreas Otte]

Currently we only allow them as part of the param, query and ref component when
the netwerk/base/src/nsURLHelper escaping code is used. With the old escaping
code in xpcom/io/nsEscape we escape it every time. [ and ] are also part of the
new ipv6 adresses but they are stripped out during parsing and put back in when
calling GetSpec or something similar. 

Comment 19

[Chris Waterson]

See my previous comment. Layout is computing the correct URL, but the front-end 
is munging it because it's "over escaping". This is either an embedding issue 
or an XPApps issue; I'll try XPApps first...

Comment 20

[Chris Waterson]

*** Bug 45250 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***

Comment 21

[sairuh (rarely reading bugmail)]

radha, would this be yours?

Comment 22

[Radha on family leave (not reading bugmail)]

this is an embedding issue. 

Comment 23

[sairuh (rarely reading bugmail)]

over to the default qa contact...

Comment 24

[Adam Lock]

Works for me

Comment 25

[scott]

Adam:

Other people are seeing the behavior I'm describing, and I'm still seeing it as
of 2000102304.  Can you double-check your steps in recreating the problem?  Make
sure you're doing an ADVANCED search, and note my other comments since the
initial posting of the bug.  Thanks.

Comment 26

[Adam Lock]

Apologies, I see the problem now.

The RFC says that square brackets should be escaped:

--
2.4. Escape Sequences

Data must be escaped if it does not have a representation using an
unreserved character; this includes data that does not correspond to
a printable character of the US-ASCII coded character set, or that
corresponds to any US-ASCII character that is disallowed, as
explained below.
--

So any character which is not unreserved (alphanum | "-" | "_" | "." | "!" | "~" 
| "*" | "'" | "(" | ")") or reserved (";" | "/" | "?" | ":" | "@" | "&" | "=" | 
"+" | "$" | ",") must be escaped. 

Therefore, it is legal that Mozilla escapes the URL in the address field. 
Probably it should escape the link too but that might break javascript (see bug 
56529). The visited link history should also do unescaped string comparison so 
link colouring and caching is correct.

Comment 27

[timeless]

Adam: Ok, so I guess you're saying this should go to history.

Comment 28

[Jesse Ruderman]

Based on adam's and timless's comments, I'd say this is a dup of bug 
12493, "layout does not canonicalize URIs for global history lookup".  Waterson 
(or others), any objections?

Comment 29

[Viswanath Ramachandran]

nav triage team: how widespread/common is this. does it only happen in some edge 
cases? it has to be common to be a beta stopper. lowerign priority. will raise 
only if common. thanks. 

Comment 30

[scott]

This is fairly widespread... I'm surprised that no one complains but me :)

I see it also at Yahoo, AltaVista, Google, Excite, Lycos...  I'm not sure if
it's because of the same reasons as Deja (I'll leave that to those more adept
than I), but using search engines is VERY difficult when you can't keep track of
which results you've visited and which you haven't.

Comment 31

[harm]

http://www.kernelnotes.org/lnxlists/linux-kernel/
shows this too
click a link on the page and go back or restart mozilla -> not marked as visited
buildid: 2000121908 M18 0.6

Comment 32

[Paul Chen]

nav triage team:

Marking nsbeta1+

And why is this stuff previously in the status whiteboard?

"The Link's Characters include [] and other stuff that must be escaped"

Comment 33

[Jesse Ruderman]

*** This bug has been marked as a duplicate of 12493 ***

Comment 34

[stephen.donner]

verified dup.