603219 - A href anchor links (e.g. #location) are removed when inserting html into a message

Status: VERIFIED DUPLICATE of bug 597784

(MailNews Core :: Composition, defect)

Description

[P. Cowan]

User-Agent:       Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 6.1; WOW64; rv:2.0b6) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/4.0b6
Build Identifier: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 6.1; en-US; rv:1.9.2.9) Gecko/20100915 Lightning/1.0b2 Thunderbird/3.1.4

When using the Insert>HTML window, if I have text which has links to an anchor on the page, e.g. <a href="#myspeciallocation">My Special Place</a>, whenever you hit insert no link is created and on inspection of the HTML the above looks like <a>My Special Place</a>

Reproducible: Always

Steps to Reproduce:
1.Write a new message
2.Insert > HTML and paste your content with anchor links
3.View the HTML of the content you've just pasted
Actual Results:  
Instead of the expected <a href="#myspecialplace"> I am presented with <a>

Expected Results:  
It should have been presented with <a href="#myspecialplace">

Comment 1

[P. Cowan]

I've remembered it also affects Thunderbird 3.0.8 on Ubuntu Linux 10.04 x86_64

Comment 2

[Ludovic Hirlimann [:Usul]]

I can reproduce with Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; Intel Mac OS X 10.5; rv:2.0b8pre) Gecko/20101010 Thunderbird/3.3a1pre.

Comment 3

[rsx11m]

Interesting, using the exact HTML code specified by the reporter, this works
for me on both Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US; rv:1.9.2.11) Gecko/20101004 Thunderbird/3.1.5 branch and Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 5.1; rv:2.0b8pre) Gecko/20101010 SeaMonkey/2.1b2pre (Insert>HTML, saved as draft).

Comment 4

[rsx11m]

(In reply to comment #1)
> I've remembered it also affects Thunderbird 3.0.8 on Ubuntu Linux 10.04 x86_64

I'm also unable to reproduce this on either Linux x86_64 1.9.1 or trunk...

Comment 5

[Ludovic Hirlimann [:Usul]]

(In reply to comment #4)
> (In reply to comment #1)
> > I've remembered it also affects Thunderbird 3.0.8 on Ubuntu Linux 10.04 x86_64
> 
> I'm also unable to reproduce this on either Linux x86_64 1.9.1 or trunk...

Did you change any defaults settings on your installs wrt to sending/composition ?

Comment 6

[P. Cowan]

I've never touched the sending/composition settings since installing Thunderbird and having a brief look over that area there are no obvious settings that relate to said issue.

It would appear that I'm not the only one with this issue as shown here - http://forums.htmlhelp.com/index.php?showtopic=12341

The issue, for me, seems to have arisen in releases after the 20th August 2010 (This was the last time I sent an email with the anchor links that worked)

Comment 7

[Ludovic Hirlimann [:Usul]]

I should have said I was asking rsx11. I'm seeing the issue too.

Comment 8

[rsx11m]

I'm using plain-text composition by default, have changed it to compose in HTML for testing and restarted. Opened a new message, Insert > HTML, copy-pasted the code given in the description, closed message, Save As Draft? > Save, gone into Drafts folder, select message, link is there and encoded HTML reads as follows:

<html>
  <head>
    <meta http-equiv="content-type" content="text/html; charset=ISO-8859-1">
  </head>
  <body text="#000000" bgcolor="#FFFFFF">
    <a href="#myspeciallocation">My Special Place</a>
  </body>
</html>

Am I following the steps to reproduce correctly or did you do anything different? I'm adding Ehsan to the CC list, maybe he has some idea.

Comment 9

[rsx11m]

BTW: All builds I'm using are after the checkin of bug 597784, which might explain a presence in 3.1.4 while being solved in 3.1.5; BUT if indeed Ludo
can reproduce the issue in a 20101010 Thunderbird/3.3a1pre build, that would contradict this assumption.

Comment 10

[rsx11m]

(In reply to comment #6)
> The issue, for me, seems to have arisen in releases after the 20th August 2010
> (This was the last time I sent an email with the anchor links that worked)

This coincides with bug 520189, effective 3.0.7/3.1.3; can you (P. Cowan) try http://ftp.mozilla.org/pub/mozilla.org/thunderbird/nightly/3.1.5-candidates/build1/win32/en-US/
to see if the issue is still reproducible there? That would give us a sanity check whether or not it's coming from that security patch and may have been resolved in the follow-up fix.

Comment 11

[Ludovic Hirlimann [:Usul]]

Hum I should have checked my draft - there's It's OK.

Comment 12

[(no longer active)]

Such anchor URLs won't be valid in the target document anyways, would they?

Comment 13

[rsx11m]

A use case for such an anchor would be a forward reference to part of the message sent, e.g., from a table of contents to the actual section. This may
not be unusual for a newsletter-style e-mail.

Comment 14

[P. Cowan]

(In reply to comment #10)
> (In reply to comment #6)
> > The issue, for me, seems to have arisen in releases after the 20th August 2010
> > (This was the last time I sent an email with the anchor links that worked)
> 
> This coincides with bug 520189, effective 3.0.7/3.1.3; can you (P. Cowan) try
> http://ftp.mozilla.org/pub/mozilla.org/thunderbird/nightly/3.1.5-candidates/build1/win32/en-US/
> to see if the issue is still reproducible there? That would give us a sanity
> check whether or not it's coming from that security patch and may have been
> resolved in the follow-up fix.

I've just installed the build you recommended and the issue doesn't arise, everything is behaving as normal!

Comment 15

[rsx11m]

Great, thanks for testing. Ludo, do you agree with either resolving as WFM or
as a dupe of bug 597784?

Comment 16

[Ludovic Hirlimann [:Usul]]

(In reply to comment #15)
> Great, thanks for testing. Ludo, do you agree with either resolving as WFM or
> as a dupe of bug 597784?

I do.