959303 - [email] Mail sending uses window.alert() to display the error message which shows user-unfriendly boilerplate text that includes e-mail app's URL/origin.

Status: RESOLVED WONTFIX

(Firefox OS Graveyard :: Gaia::E-Mail, defect)

Description

[Naoki Hirata :nhirata (please use needinfo instead of cc)]

Attachment: 2014-01-14-03-16-45.png

1. launch email
2. setup email w/ valid account
3. turn wifi and Mobile data off
4. compose email
5. try to send

Expected: no placeholder
Actual: placeholder and it tries to keep sending in the background if you have the overlay up

Comment 1

[Naoki Hirata :nhirata (please use needinfo instead of cc)]

Gaia      c52162095093657e6b2eea9c916221f4a708bed2
Gecko     a87352cc59309c369eef78b316e83950568564b9
BuildID   20140110170713
Version   29.0a1
ro.build.version.incremental=324
ro.build.date=Thu Dec 19 14:04:55 CST 2013
Buri

Comment 2

[James Burke [:jrburke]]

Can you expand on the meaning of "no placeholder" or what placeholder means in this context? My normal frame of reference for "placeholder" is placeholder text in an input field when no user text has been entered. Maybe it means "no error alert dialog"?

Background sending, tracked in bug 921050, will likely be the solution for this if the bug is in general about wanting background send with weird network conditions. So I am going to speculatively dupe this to that bug, but if this is about something else, we can reset the bug once we clarify the work to be done.

Comment 3

[Naoki Hirata :nhirata (please use needinfo instead of cc)]

"The page at app:..." is a placeholder text which should not appear.  This isn't a duplicate.  We have to either refine this page or remove the page.

Comment 4

[Andrew Sutherland [:asuth] (he/him)]

Placeholder has very explicit semantics in HTML5 (https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/HTML/Element/Input), let's call this boilerplate text.

James is right that bug 921050 will address this bug and this bug is not going to be addressed before that's addressed.  But duping is probably a little over-zealous.  We'll just mark this fixed when we fix that bug and then someone gets multiple fix karma points.  I've cleaned up the title.

Comment 5

[Naoki Hirata :nhirata (please use needinfo instead of cc)]

Thanks for the explanation.  I saw the word place holder for the text in various bugs such as bug 914317, it's been repeated several times in bugzilla.  I'll stop using it as that term.  Should we have a different term for the text?

Comment 6

[Andrew Sutherland [:asuth] (he/him)]

Ah yeah, that bug definitely uses placeholder that way, but that's not in keeping with http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/placeholder.  The HTML5 attribute is for providing text to display in an empty text-box so the user has an idea what's supposed to go in there, which is in keeping with the definition.

Boilerplate (http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/boilerplate) or canned text is probably more accurate, but they're both misleading in regards to the actual problem.

The web platform provides window.alert(message), window.confirm(message), and window.prompt(message); spec at http://dev.w3.org/html5/spec-preview/user-prompts.html.  On Firefox and Chrome these pop up modal dialog boxes.  (Screenshot/more deets at https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/API/Window.confirm).

In order to make it clear to the user that it's web content that is causing the dialog to appear, the message includes an indication of the web page that is causing the prompt to occur.  Without this, it would be easier to trick users by doing window.alert("Your computer has a virus!  A web page will appear, enter your credit card number immediately!").

Firefox OS conforms to this idiom even though the app is equally capable of faking it.  (I think.  It's possible there may be some subtle indication that the system is gemerating the overlay.)  Probably mainly because there's no way to specify the title.

Which is all to say, the bug is that the programmer was lazy and used window.alert instead of using the confirmation dialog building block and adding new strings.  But the programmer was not lazy and decided to explicitly type out "app://blah/ says" as a string.  In my, clearly super pedantic mind, that's when we'd say placeholder text or boilerplate or something.  (And doing that would be a horrible, bad l10n no-no.)

Comment 7

[BMO Automation]

Firefox OS is not being worked on