359574 - Quote levels behavior is inconsistent on Enter/Delete

Status: NEW

(MailNews Core :: Composition, defect)

Description

[Mattias Jiderhamn]

User-Agent:       Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; sv-SE; rv:1.8.1) Gecko/20061010 Firefox/2.0
Build Identifier: TB 1.5.0.7 20060909

You can insert a blank line before or inside a quote, by pressing Enter. But trying to remove the same line by pressing Delete or Backspace, instead causes a change in the quoting levels of the following quotes or inserts some "empty" quotes. This is perceived as (very) inconsistent and unexpected, at least if you are used to Eudoras behaviour.

Eudoras behaviour is preferable, since from there you can recreate Thunderbirds current behaiviour manually (by removing quote levels). With Thunderbirds behaviour, the only solution (AFAIK) is to undo until you get the original quote levels back, which removes any other changes you may have made.

Please see attached images for visual explanation.

Reproducible: Always

Comment 1

[Mattias Jiderhamn]

Attachment: Explanation/comparison for line inserted before quote

Comment 2

[Mattias Jiderhamn]

Attachment: Explanation/comparison for line inserted inside quote

Comment 3

[Mike Cowperthwaite]

Reproduced with TB 2b1-1026 and Seamonkey 1.5a-0925.

This is true.  When editing HTML mail and inserting a newline into the quote, the <blockquote>s surrounding the newline are split up into two separate blocks, with a <br> in between where the caret is placed so you can start typing.  Then typing Delete at the <br> deletes not just the <br> tag but all the tags down to the start of the quoted text, then performs some kind of tag fixup after the end of the paragraph so that the remaining part of the quote continues as a quote.  If you're at the beginning of a paragraph, <enter>+<del> is the same as <bksp>.  <enter>+<bksp> doesn't remove the quoting level but it does leave the quote split into two top-level <blockquote>s with no <br> between them.

See bug 344280 for a related issue.

Comment 4

[Mike Cowperthwaite]

Note that the behavior of breaking up the <blockquote> on <enter> is specific to mail, but the behavior of deleting all tags between caret and text on <del> occurs in Seamonkey Composer (and in NVu).

Comment 5

[Mattias Jiderhamn]

Attachment: Really weird behaviour

I totally forgot about the strangest part of Thunderbirds behaviour. I really cannot call it anything short of a bug. And a quite annoying one, if your do a lot of "bottom posting" compositions.
See attached image.

Comment 6

[buovjaga]

Still repro.

Thunderbird 52.1.1 (32-bit)
Windows 7 64-bit