428918 - Copying location bar contents may export invalid IRI to the clipboard

Status: RESOLVED INACTIVE

(Firefox :: Address Bar, defect)

Description

[Henri Sivonen (:hsivonen) (away from Bugzilla until 2026-09-07)]

Build ID:
Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; U; PPC Mac OS X 10.5; en-US; rv:1.9pre) Gecko/2008041304 Minefield/3.0pre

Steps to reproduce:
 1) Load http://software.hixie.ch/utilities/cgi/data/data
 2) Press "Generate"
 3) Select all in the location bar
 4) Copy
 5) Paste into a text editor

Actual results:
U+0020 SPACE is exported to clipboard literally is displayed in the location bar instead of escaping it as '%20'.

Expected results:
Expected characters that are not allowed literally even in IRIs to be escaped when exporting the location bar contents to the clipboard.

Comment 1

[:Gavin Sharp [email: [e-mail]]]

We intentionally don't re-encode data: URIs after bug 394667. Perhaps we should reconsider that.

Comment 2

[Dão Gottwald [:dao]]

Which problems does this actually cause? Are these problems more serious than the annoyance that bug 394667 refers to?

Comment 3

[Henri Sivonen (:hsivonen) (away from Bugzilla until 2026-09-07)]

The concrete annoyance was that copying a bad data: URL from Minefield to an <input type=url> field in Opera made form validation fail in Opera.

Comment 4

[Dão Gottwald [:dao]]

What's <input type=url>? Maybe Opera should be more lax about the strings it accepts, or rather, maybe it should try to convert the user input to a valid URL, like the address bar does it?

Comment 5

[Henri Sivonen (:hsivonen) (away from Bugzilla until 2026-09-07)]

<input type=url> is an HTML5 form field that accepts only absolute IRIs and that has the semantics of accepting only them so the browser can provide history-based auto-completion.
http://www.whatwg.org/specs/web-apps/current-work/multipage/forms.html#url-state

If Firefox exports invalid IRIs to the clipboard, every app that might want to accept IRIs on paste needs to be able to do repair. HTML5 since a few days ago allows browsers to implement repair in <input type=url>.

Further, plain text email or chats are disadvantaged if people can paste strings from Firefox that aren't detectable as IRIs at the other end.

Comment 6

[Dão Gottwald [:dao]]

> Further, plain text email or chats are disadvantaged if people can paste
> strings from Firefox that aren't detectable as IRIs at the other end.

Yeah, that's why we encode all other urls. For data: and javascript:, linkification seems less important to me.

Comment 7

[BMO Automation]

Per policy at https://wiki.mozilla.org/Bug_Triage/Projects/Bug_Handling/Bug_Husbandry#Inactive_Bugs. If this bug is not an enhancement request or a bug not present in a supported release of Firefox, then it may be reopened.