Issue status update for http://drupal.org/node/13148 Post a follow up: http://drupal.org/project/comments/add/13148 Project: Drupal -Version: 4.6.3 +Version: cvs Component: base system Category: support requests Priority: normal Assigned to: Anonymous Reported by: kbahey Updated by: Goba -Status: active +Status: patch (code needs review) What if you let this issue get solved for CVS HEAD (4.7), before requesting a patch for 4.6.x? (Restoring important status values). Goba Previous comments: ------------------------------------------------------------------------ Fri, 19 Nov 2004 03:29:34 +0000 : kbahey Looking at my site's logs, there seem to be several problems that are caused by Drupal's use of relative path names. If Drupal causes all the site's urls to be absolute, then none of this would be an issue. A. Search Engine Crawlers Getting lots of 404s on things like: linux/index.html/robots.txt Where 'linux' is an alias to a taxonomy, and 'index.html' is an alias to a node within that taxonomy. Another example, is recursing unnecessarily. I see 404s on things like: /linux/index.html/linux/index.html Where 'linux' is a path alias for a taxonomy term, and 'index.html' is an alias to the main node within it. This does not seem to happen when Google crawls my sites, but Yahoo's Slurp suffers from this problem, and keeps recursing. MSNBot also suffers from this. Another crawler/harvester called Blinkx/DFS-Fetch keeps adding the .css file to the relative path, getting a 404 on things like: /linux/themes/xtemplate/pushbutton/logo.gif And Fast Search Engine also attempts to access: /linux/contact/tracker/tracker/user/password The same goes for grub.org, another crawler. B. Google Cache / Archive Way Back Machine Pages in Google cache and archive.org Way Back Machine suffer form a similar problem: the .css files cannot be found, and hence rendering of the pages is not correct. Examples: Compare this: http://www.drupal.org/node/4647 To this: http://www.google.ca/search?q=cache:www.drupal.org/node/view/4647 Notice the following: * How there is no formatting at all, because of the lack of a .css file * The httpd log on Drupal will show errors for: linux/themes/pushbutton/style.css and linux/misc/drupal.css Also see: http://web.archive.org/web/20031016184902/http://www.drupal.org/ C. Proxy Caches: When someone is browsing my site from behind a proxy cache, the web site is hit with a rapid succession of requests, and many of it is just for bogus pages. Examples: 2004/11/17 - 17:47 404 error: linux/user/1 not found. 2004/11/17 - 17:47 404 error: linux/feedback not found. 2004/11/17 - 17:47 404 error: linux/tracker not found. 2004/11/17 - 17:47 404 error: linux/sitemap not found. 2004/11/17 - 17:47 404 error: linux/search not found. 2004/11/17 - 17:47 404 error: linux/misc not found. 2004/11/17 - 17:47 404 error: linux/programming not found. 2004/11/17 - 17:47 404 error: linux/programming not found. 2004/11/17 - 17:47 404 error: linux/linux not found. 2004/11/17 - 17:47 404 error: linux/technology not found. 2004/11/17 - 17:47 404 error: linux/writings not found. 2004/11/17 - 17:47 404 error: linux/family not found. And also: 2004/11/17 - 07:23 404 error: history/user/1 not found. 2004/11/17 - 07:23 404 error: history/tracker not found. 2004/11/17 - 07:23 404 error: history/feedback not found. 2004/11/17 - 07:23 404 error: history/sitemap not found. 2004/11/17 - 07:23 404 error: history/search not found. 2004/11/17 - 07:23 404 error: history/misc not found. 2004/11/17 - 07:23 404 error: history/technology not found. 2004/11/17 - 07:23 404 error: history/science not found. 2004/11/17 - 07:22 404 error: history/history not found. 2004/11/17 - 07:22 404 error: history/writings not found. 2004/11/17 - 07:22 404 error: history/family not found. As you can tell, history and linux are aliases to taxonomy terms, and so is misc, technology, writings, family, ...etc. The user agent is appending the taxonomy term alias to the url and forming a new URL. D. Regular Browsing: There is even at least one extreme case where the following URL was accessed (the result was 404 of course) /book/view/themes/xtemplate/pushbutton/themes/xtemplate/pushbutton/themes/xtemplate/pushbutton/themes/xtemplate/pushbutton/themes/xtemplate/pushbutton/themes/xtemplate/pushbutton/themes/xtemplate/pushbutton/themes/xtemplate/pushbutton/themes/xtemplate/pushbutton/themes/xtemplate/pushbutton/themes/xtemplate/pushbutton/themes/xtemplate/pushbutton/themes/xtemplate/pushbutton/themes/xtemplate/pushbutton/themes/xtemplate/pushbutton/themes/xtemplate/pushbutton/themes/xtemplate/pushbutton/themes/xtemplate/pushbutton/themes/xtemplate/pushbutton/themes/xtemplate/pushbutton/themes/xtemplate/pushbutton/themes/xtemplate/pushbutton/themes/xtemplate/pushbutton/themes/xtemplate/pushbutton/themes/xtemplate/pushbutton/themes/xtemplate/pushbutton/themes/xtemplate/pushbutton/themes/xtemplate/pushbutton/themes/xtemplate/pushbutton/themes/xtemplate/pushbutton/themes/xtemplate/pushbutton/themes/xtemplate/pushbutton/themes/xtemplate/pushbutton/themes/xtemplate/pushbutton/themes/xtemplate/pushbutton /themes/xtemplate/pushbutton/themes/xtemplate/pushbutton/themes/xtemplate/pushbutton/themes/xtemplate/pushbutton/themes/xtemplate/pushbutton/themes/xtemplate/pushbutton/themes/xtemplate/pushbutton/themes/xtemplate/pushbutton/themes/xtemplate/pushbutton/themes/xtemplate/pushbutton/themes/xtemplate/pushbutton/themes/xtemplate/pushbutton/themes/xtemplate/pushbutton/themes/xtemplate/pushbutton/themes/xtemplate/pushbutton/themes/xtemplate/pushbutton/themes/xtemplate/pushbutton/themes/xtemplate/pushbutton/themes/xtemplate/pushbutton/themes/xtemplate/pushbutton/themes/xtemplate/pushbutton/themes/xtemplate/pushbutton/themes/xtemplate/pushbutton/themes/xtemplate/pushbutton/themes/xtemplate/pushbutton/themes/xtemplate/pushbutton/themes/xtemplate/pushbutton/themes/xtemplate/pushbutton/themes/xtemplate/pushbutton/themes/xtemplate/pushbutton/themes/xtemplate/pushbutton/themes/xtemplate/pushbutton/themes/xtemplate/pushbutton/themes/xtemplate/pushbutton/themes/xtemplate/pushbutton/themes/x template/pushbutton/themes/xtemplate/pushbutton/themes/xtemplate/pushbutton/themes/xtemplate/pushbutton/themes/xtemplate/pushbutton/themes/xtemplate/pushbutton/themes/xtemplate/pushbutton/themes/xtemplate/pushbutton/themes/xtemplate/pushbutton/themes/xtemplate/pushbutton/themes/xtemplate/pushbutton/themes/xtemplate/pushbutton/themes/xtemplate/pushbutton/themes/xtemplate/pushbutton/themes/xtemplate/pushbutton/themes/xtemplate/pushbutton/themes/xtemplate/pushbutton/themes/xtemplate/pushbutton/themes/xtemplate/pushbutton/themes/xtemplate/pushbutton/themes/xtemplate/pushbutton/themes/xtemplate/pushbutton/themes/xtemplate/pushbutton/themes/xtemplate/pushbutton/themes/xtemplate/pushbutton/themes/xtemplate/pushbutton/themes/xtemplate/pushbutton/themes/xtemplate/pushbutton/themes/xtemplate/pushbutton/themes/xtemplate/pushbutton/themes/xtemplate/pushbutton/themes/xtemplate/pushbutton/themes/xtemplate/pushbutton/themes/xtemplate/pushbutton/themes/xtemplate/pushbutton/themes/xtemplate/ pushbutton/themes/xtemplate/pushbutton/themes/xtemplate/pushbutton/themes/xtemplate/pushbutton/themes/xtemplate/pushbutton/themes/xtemplate/pushbutton/themes/xtemplate/pushbutton/themes/xtemplate/pushbutton/themes/xtemplate/pushbutton/themes/xtemplate/pushbutton/themes/xtemplate/pushbutton/themes/xtemplate/pushbutton/themes/xtemplate/pushbutton/themes/xtemplate/pushbutton/themes/xtemplate/pushbutton/themes/xtemplate/pushbutton/themes/xtemplate/pushbutton/themes/xtemplate/pushbutton/themes/xtemplate/pushbutton/themes/xtemplate/pushbutton/themes/xtemplate/pushbutton/themes/xtemplate/pushbutton/themes/xtemplate/pushbutton/themes/xtemplate/pushbutton/themes/xtemplate/pushbutton/themes/xtemplate/pushbutton/themes/xtemplate/pushbutton/themes/xtemplate/pushbutton/themes/xtemplate/pushbutton/themes/xtemplate/pushbutton/themes/xtemplate/pushbutton/themes/xtemplate/pushbutton/themes/xtemplate/pushbutton/themes/xtemplate/pushbutton/themes/xtemplate/pushbutton/themes/xtemplate/pushbutto n/themes/xtemplate/pushbutton/themes/xtemplate/pushbutton/themes/xtemplate/pushbutton/themes/xtemplate/pushbutton/logo.gif It seems it was a normal user, because the user agent is: "Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 5.5; Windows 98; Win 9x 4.90)" Proposed Solution: As a proposed solution, all URLs in Drupal can be made into absolute path names. This can be done by the following: * The variable $base_url in the conf.php file is broken down into two components: * $base_host (the 'http://whatever-host.example.com' part WITHOUT the trailing slash) * $base_path (the '/path-to-drupal' part, WITH the leading slash. If this is the DocumentRoot, then it is just a '/' character) * $base_url is now $base_host concatenated with $base_path * A simple filter can be written to preceed every href="path" with the $base_path variable, so it becomes "/path" * This option can be turned on and off for a site. The default is to have it off so current behavior is maintained. * A similar scheme applies for style sheets as well. So, did I miss something obvious? Am I seriously off the mark? Your thoughts! ------------------------------------------------------------------------ Sat, 20 Nov 2004 04:10:17 +0000 : chrisada I am getting similar 404 errors, mainly from rss feed link that looks like /blog/blog/feed and many manual links that are relative to drupal root. It was not a problem before Drupal 4.5, so I think there might not be a need to change all URIs to absolute. I can't see where the problem is coming from though. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ Sat, 20 Nov 2004 04:35:06 +0000 : kbahey I am pretty sure that these problems were happening for at least the past 10 months (ever since I moved to Drupal in January 2004). The main issue here is that crawlers and other user agents get confused by the relative path names. Using absolute paths will definitely solve this. However, is this the only solution? I am looking for a discussion of this. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ Sat, 20 Nov 2004 09:55:21 +0000 : Goba No absolute paths please. Having the path start with '/' solves all the mentioned problems, and is not absolute, it is relative to the domain. Sadly some crawlers and even the Google Cache does not obey to the base href. I have reported this cache problem in April to Google, and they promised they will keep it in mind... Hehe... What we need is to have the printed relative path values relative to the domain name, and not relative to the Drupal installation path. Note that this issue will appear on the drupal devel mailing list if someone finally provides a patch we can talk about :) ------------------------------------------------------------------------ Sat, 20 Nov 2004 10:19:30 +0000 : Dries Goba is right. We need paths relative to the domain name to fix this 'problem'. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ Sat, 20 Nov 2004 20:19:32 +0000 : kbahey Sorry for not making my self clear. When I said absolute, I meant that they start with just a /. I did NOT mean that they start with http://host.example.com. That would be a very bad idea. In any case, what do people think about the proposed solution (breaking down $base_url into two parts?) Also, does this address the style sheets as well, or more is needed? ------------------------------------------------------------------------ Sun, 21 Nov 2004 16:24:27 +0000 : chx Attachment: http://drupal.org/files/issues/common_inc_patch.txt (471 bytes) I have implemented what Goba suggested. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ Sun, 21 Nov 2004 16:43:56 +0000 : chx Attachment: http://drupal.org/files/issues/common_inc_patch_0.txt (825 bytes) Maybe this one is faster? ------------------------------------------------------------------------ Sun, 21 Nov 2004 17:34:37 +0000 : kbahey Man! You are fast! I tried the second version. It works fine for things that are not inside the node body, I mean they have a / in front of them, as we want it to be. Two comments/issues: - If there is a URL that is already "/" representing the home page, it gets set to "//". Perhaps it should check for that case? - URLs in nodes that do not start with / do not get changed to have a / prepended to them. Do we need a filter for this? - Do we need to do something for the style sheets in the page header? I mean the "misc/drupal.css" and "themes/themename/style.css"? Thanks ------------------------------------------------------------------------ Mon, 22 Nov 2004 00:28:01 +0000 : kbahey Hi chx Here is a fix for the case where you have a url that is just "/". In your patch, instead of: <?php $base = $parts['path'] . '/' ; ?> Replace that by: <?php $base = ( $path == '/' ? $base : $parts['path'] . '/' ); ?> ------------------------------------------------------------------------ Sun, 28 Nov 2004 04:08:56 +0000 : kbahey Did this patch make it into CVS yet? If there are any objections to it, can someone please explain what they are? Thanks ------------------------------------------------------------------------ Sun, 28 Nov 2004 09:33:01 +0000 : Dries Shouldn't your changes be included in the patch? Also, it's better to cache $base rather than $parts. Lastly, it this patch makes it to HEAD, we should probably remove some 'base url' cruft from the themes. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ Sun, 28 Nov 2004 18:54:02 +0000 : kbahey Attachment: http://drupal.org/files/issues/x.diff (1 KB) Here is the patch including my fix. I am asking chx to comment on caching $base instead of $parts. Will this make it faster? ------------------------------------------------------------------------ Sun, 28 Nov 2004 19:26:59 +0000 : chx Hm. $base = ( $path == '/' ? $base : $parts['path'] . '/' ); this depends on path which is a parameter. Thus I fail to see how could we cache $base. I'd correct this code however $base = ( $path == '/' ? '' : $parts['path'] . '/' ); 'cos I think $base is not defined before, but this is not a problem, PHP will be happy to replace NULL with NULL... Maybe instead of all parts, only $parts['path'] is enough to be cached, yes, but the performance and memory usage difference -- I guess -- would not be noticable... ------------------------------------------------------------------------ Sun, 28 Nov 2004 23:06:39 +0000 : kbahey Attachment: http://drupal.org/files/issues/common-inc-patch.txt (1 KB) OK. I put in chx suggested change. This patch can go in CVS then, to rid us of the problems with paths not beginning with slash. This is not an ultimate solution still. We need to address the problem with .css files. Although the header contains a: <base href="http://example.com" /> it does not seem that major search engines and archiving sites obey it anyway. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ Thu, 02 Dec 2004 20:31:27 +0000 : Dries Your coding style needs work. Also, I'm not going to commit this unless the themes get fixed up: we'd end up with invalid URLs all over the place. Lastly, I wonder how portable the themes will be when Drupal is run from within a subdirectory. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ Thu, 02 Dec 2004 21:15:19 +0000 : chx Attachment: http://drupal.org/files/issues/common_inc_patch_1.txt (849 bytes) Well, my patch worked from a subdirectory very well, as fact, I have not tested it from the root dir. And I think that it adheres to coding standards. So I resubmit it with the root path fix. However, my Drupal work is focused on i18n these days, and I was never into themeing so it won't be me who fixes those. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ Thu, 02 Dec 2004 22:07:08 +0000 : kbahey I have tested the previous patch (including my fix) with drupal installed in the DocumentRoot of the server. So, in effect, it is tested with both Drupal in / and Drupal in a subdirectory. This change fixes the problem for the crawlers and other browsers from getting confused. While it is true that there is no fix for the .css files in the HTML head section yet, this fix deals with a major part of the problem, and rids us of a major pain. Check your web server's logs some time to see what I mean. Someone who is familiar with the themes can contribute a patch later. This patch and the future fix for themes are not mutually exclusive, so let it go in CVS. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ Thu, 09 Dec 2004 15:31:57 +0000 : Goba Please commit this into Drupal core, this fix is badly needed. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ Mon, 17 Jan 2005 13:00:12 +0000 : chx Attachment: http://drupal.org/files/issues/base_url_kill.patch (4.34 KB) Well as noone have stepped in to fix this problem, I have tried to fix the themes also. themes.inc , xtemplate.engine and the bluemarine template is patched besides common.inc. Of course, more templates could follow, but first I'd like to see your opinions. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ Mon, 17 Jan 2005 13:09:10 +0000 : Goba I don't think that removing <base> from the themes is a good idea, using $parts['path'] should be encouraged though before the files, which would fix the google cache problem, and would still keep the HTML size low. It would also help those, who save the file to find the originating site easier, since clicking on a non-pagelocal link would lead to the online version. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ Mon, 17 Jan 2005 16:03:02 +0000 : Steven Definitely -1 on removing the <base> tag or using absolute or root-relative URLs. This tag has been around for ages, and it is the only way to make clean URLs work without bloating in the code. FYI, "base" is (first?) mentioned in Berners-Lee's HTML 1.0 draft [1]. That's June 1993. As the amount of clean URL-using sites grows, the crawlers will have to be updated. Perhaps we could prevent crawlers from going too insane by 404ing for URLs with more than say 10 components? That would prevent the really crappy ones from hammering your site. I'm all for making the <base> tag easier to handle for the user (say, by including a filter to allow simple anchor links to work as most people expect them to), but we should keep Drupal-generated URLs clean and completely relative. [1] http://www.w3.org/MarkUp/draft-ietf-iiir-html-01.txt ------------------------------------------------------------------------ Mon, 17 Jan 2005 16:57:09 +0000 : kbahey The problem with css is this: The @import argument does not start with a /. This is simple to fix. We keep the "base" as it is today, but add the new variable: $base before it. So for a site where Drupal is installed in the DocumentRoot, all that will change is that /misc/drupal.css and /themes/themename/style.css will be preceded by a slash. For sites that use another path, that path will be prepended to the css file name. How about that? ------------------------------------------------------------------------ Mon, 17 Jan 2005 17:38:10 +0000 : Steven What exactly is the problem with the @import? As far as I know: - url() in stylesheets is interpreted relative to the base of the stylesheet, not the source document. - However, if the styles are inside an HTML document, through a style tag or style attribute, then the stylesheet's location is the same as the HTML document. - Thus, the stylesheet's base is the same as the base of the HTML document (which can be altered through the <base> tag). I just don't see why it is necessary. As far as I know, the only browser that has had problems resolving CSS urls properly was Netscape 4, which does not support @import at all, and which Drupal does not support either, because of its CSS usage. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ Mon, 17 Jan 2005 18:35:07 +0000 : kbahey The problem for stylesheets is as follows. I think it mainly affect crawlers and Google's cache. Say you have an installtion of Drupal in DocumentRoot. You then use url aliases, and put slashes in them. For example, you use news/general/2004-12-15.html for a node. That node still has misc/drupal.css and themes/pushbutton/style.css in the head section if the document. Crawlers get fooled by that and try to look for /news/general/misc/drupal.css and /news/general/themes/pushbutton/style.css, which don't exist. So, just prepending the new $base variable (in chx's patch) before the stylesheet @import argument would fix this issue. Assuming you are in DocumentRoot, then /misc and /themes would be used instead of just misc and themes. It would still be compliant with standards, be relative to the web site, and no ambiguous to anyone, be they crawler or browser. I hope it is clearer now. I think chx can change the patch to use the $base instead of $base_url everywhere, so as to avoid the host/domain name in the urls. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ Mon, 17 Jan 2005 21:36:32 +0000 : Steven But typical crawlers don't even pay attention to stylesheets, hence it wouldn't have much use for them. I just don't see why we should adjust to rare cases of buggy software. Reading out a base URL from an HTML document is dead easy, and on top of that it doesn't add more complexity as without the base tag, the document's URL is already an implicit base which has to be parsed anyway. I did not like it when we altered the <link> tag to accomodate buggy RSS readers and I certainly don't like it now, as this is even rarer. In both cases, it is not Drupal which is at fault. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ Mon, 17 Jan 2005 21:48:45 +0000 : kbahey Steven While I agree with most of what you said, the 404s show up in the logs enough to be a bother. Perhaps the original design of Drupal did not forsee that people will use url aliases to mimic directory/file hierarchies. Whether this was intended or not, it is the way many use Drupal today. It does not matter where the bug is (Drupal or the external world), as long as we can stop it ourselves, by adjusting our end of it. The fix is simple enough and does not break standards (if implemented as described with a leading / before the css). ------------------------------------------------------------------------ Mon, 17 Jan 2005 21:54:30 +0000 : Steven It does not break standards, but it does bloat the code in an ugly way. Why not send an e-mail to the owners of the crawlers and tell them to implement a standard that is nearly 10 years old [2] (RFC 1808)? Note that Google Cache now seems to correctly interpret base URLs [3] and even adds a <base> tag of its own. By the way, this problem has nothing to do with people using URL aliases or not, as for a browser the regular nested paths that Drupal uses (e.g. "node/1" is no different from aliases mimicking files "foo/bar.html"). [2] http://www.faqs.org/rfcs/rfc1808.html [3] http://www.google.be/search?q=cache%3Awww.drupal.org&sourceid=mozilla-search... ------------------------------------------------------------------------ Mon, 17 Jan 2005 22:34:25 +0000 : Goba Steven, part of the problem is that Google cache does add a base href even if there is a base href in the document. Eg adds a <BASE HREF="http://drupal.org/node/13733"> on the plone comparision page cached. Now that since HTML does not allow more than one base tag [4] to be present, it is up to the browsers, to use the first or the last base value, or any of the base values on the page for that matter as the used base. So even pages displayed from the google cache will be buggy if a full relative path to the domain root is not specified, due to this problem. [4] http://www.w3.org/TR/1999/REC-html401-19991224/sgml/dtd.html#head.content ------------------------------------------------------------------------ Tue, 18 Jan 2005 07:14:21 +0000 : chx Attachment: http://drupal.org/files/issues/base_url_kill_0.patch (4.75 KB) This one does not use the whole base_url only the path part of it. HTML bloat is kept at minimal. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ Tue, 01 Feb 2005 23:33:58 +0000 : clairem Please please can this be done? It's a good idea in itself, but if using fully-qualified paths means we can get rid of the BASE HREF, then page anchors will work without having the overhead of a filter. That's be a huge bonus for those creating larger nodes, or who just want to be able to put a "skip navigation" link in their theme without having to abandon Xtemplate or PHPtemplate ------------------------------------------------------------------------ Tue, 01 Feb 2005 23:37:23 +0000 : Goba Well, speaking of skip navigation links, phptemplate and xtemplate should expose the REQUEST_URI to the templates, so when a link to an anchor on the same page is needed, the link can be formatted with the complete request URI in mind. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ Wed, 02 Feb 2005 23:40:36 +0000 : clairem "hptemplate and xtemplate should expose the REQUEST_URI to the templates " Should, but don't :( If BASE HREF isn't removed, surely it wouldn't be a big job to implement this tweak? ------------------------------------------------------------------------ Thu, 17 Feb 2005 14:50:29 +0000 : kbahey This patch is badly needed. The lack of a leading / in many paths is causing lots of problems. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ Sat, 12 Mar 2005 20:32:26 +0000 : kbahey Can this patch be applied for 4.6? it is really badly needed. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ Tue, 22 Mar 2005 20:50:55 +0000 : Dries I don't see why this is badly needed. We generate perfectly valid URLs which are supposed to be short and crispy. This patch has some advantages though, yet it is unclear which patch to go with. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ Tue, 22 Mar 2005 21:00:45 +0000 : chx The second patch is better. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ Tue, 22 Mar 2005 21:46:27 +0000 : grohk Forgive me for saying so, but since the way Drupal is generating hyperlinks is completely valid, why are you suggesting Drupal should move away from an accepted standard when the problem lies with the search engines? At the very least, this needs to be optional -- which it appears to be -- I hate the 404s too, but I hate to hear that a change in Drupal is needed to fix a Google problem. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ Tue, 22 Mar 2005 22:03:51 +0000 : jhriggs I have to agree with the last comment from grohk. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ Tue, 22 Mar 2005 22:39:33 +0000 : mathias I also agree with the two previous Drupaleers, but I wouldn't mind enabling a 'quirks mode' via my conf file to stop the flood of 404 messages. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ Wed, 23 Mar 2005 00:37:52 +0000 : kbahey I really can't fathom why some of us cannot deal with with the realities out there in the world. These problems are not because Drupal is broken. It is because crawlers are. We cannot just bury our collective heads in the sand and say that we are standards compliant and forget about what is out there. As an analogy, people who design themes or write CSS have to deal with the ugliness of Microsoft Internet Explorer and its intentional going against standards. You cannot tell a client or your boss that you are not modifying a theme that works perfectly on Konqueror and Firefox because MS IE is broken. Similarly, we cannot ignore that crawlers from major search engine companies are broken or confused, and keep recursing through site using Drupal causing countless errors in the logs. We cannot tell our users to ask Google and Yahoo et al to fix their software. Remember that we are not breaking any standards by implementing this patch. All we are doing is putting the entire path out (from the first / down) and thus eliminating ambiguity for everyone. Sorry if I am a bit blunt in this post, but I am tired of what may be seen as isolationist thinking. I do not mind if this is implemented in an advanced mode or via a settings.php thing. All I care about is getting it fixed somehow. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ Fri, 29 Apr 2005 23:29:41 +0000 : kbahey Circular log errors reported here too http://drupal.org/node/9499 ------------------------------------------------------------------------ Sat, 30 Apr 2005 19:35:50 +0000 : shane I agree with KBAHEY. Burrying our head in the sand and saying "it ain't our problem" is not going to fix the issue. I despise companies that break standards - and I applaud Drupal for working hard to keep within those confines. But the reality is money grubbing, lazy ass programmers exist the world over, and the consequence is things like MSIE breaking everything wantonly and intentionally, Google, Yahoo, et al implementing poor bot code, etc... I believe this desperately needs to get fixed. Ever since I started hand writing HTML code in 1992 I have always insured that my URL paths are absolute to the base html document root (eg, preceeded with "/" and the full path). It avoids confusion, problems, or issues. It seems odd that the debate over this would rage as it has in this thread. ...and I don't get the "bloat" discussion. How is this bloating things? Are we talking a few dozen extra characters? I hope I'm missing something more obvious and insidious than that!? I've been a loyal Drupaler for ages now, and I love it. But this new problem is causing me a lot of grief, I see frequent munging of the URLs, and it worries me; particularly when I see that there are end users getting 404s. They don't give a rats ba-tu-tey that Drupal is "standards compliant" ... they just know they got an error when they supposedely did exactly what they should have, click on a URL. That reflects poorly on the site owner and ultimately on the software itself. Please reconsider this issue, and let a patch go into core to fix it. It doesn't make sense to let it rage on as an issue that is causing lots of people obvious grief. I'm betting it's a bigger issue than most admins think - most don't spend the anal-retentitive time that I and others do grubbing through our logs, trying to insure a "perfect" surfing experience for our end-users... ------------------------------------------------------------------------ Sun, 01 May 2005 22:09:58 +0000 : clydefrog This is truly not a problem with Drupal, but it may be reasonable to change Drupal's behavior anyway. The base href tag has been in the W3C standards since /1997/ [5]. Failing to observe this tag isn't about being slow on the uptake (as with MSIE and CSS2). It's about deliberately breaking existing compatibility. Has anyone contacted Yahoo, MSN, etc. and told them of this problem? If and when they fix their crawlers, we need to be able to turn off this kludge to discourage other more marginal crawlers to observe the standards. [5] http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-html32#base ------------------------------------------------------------------------ Sun, 01 May 2005 22:11:04 +0000 : clydefrog That should be "encourage other more marginal crawlers to observe the standards." ------------------------------------------------------------------------ Fri, 06 May 2005 19:00:40 +0000 : kbahey Here are examples from drupal.org itself: As you can see, if the paths started with a slash, none of this would have happened. warning page not found 06/05/2005 - 10:36 drupal-sites/themes/bluebeach/style.css not found. warning page not found 06/05/2005 - 10:36 drupal-sites/themes/bluebeach/print.css not found. warning page not found 06/05/2005 - 10:36 drupal-sites/misc/drupal.css not found. warning page not found 06/05/2005 - 10:33 about/tracker not found. warning page not found 06/05/2005 - 10:33 about/support not found. warning page not found 06/05/2005 - 10:33 about/project not found. warning page not found 06/05/2005 - 10:33 about/services not found. warning page not found 06/05/2005 - 10:33 about/handbook not found. warning page not found 06/05/2005 - 10:33 about/features not found. warning page not found 06/05/2005 - 10:33 about/forum not found. warning page not found 06/05/2005 - 10:33 about/drupal-sites not found. warning page not found 06/05/2005 - 10:33 about/druplicon not found. warning page not found 06/05/2005 - 10:33 about/download not found. warning page not found 06/05/2005 - 10:33 about/donate not found. warning page not found 06/05/2005 - 10:33 about/documentation-writers-guide not found. warning page not found 06/05/2005 - 10:33 about/contributors-guide not found. warning page not found 06/05/2005 - 10:33 about/cvs not found. warning page not found 06/05/2005 - 10:33 about/contact not found. warning page not found 06/05/2005 - 10:33 about/contribute not found. warning page not found 06/05/2005 - 10:33 about/aggregator not found. warning page not found 06/05/2005 - 10:33 about/cases not found. warning page not found 06/05/2005 - 10:33 about/about not found. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ Fri, 06 May 2005 19:14:23 +0000 : grohk Just because some of us disagree with this solution to the perceived problem does not mean we are not fond of reality, it just mean we have a different way of seeing this issue. If we cannot use accepted standards in Drupal, then what are good is it to adhere to them in the first place? Does this patch really affect the experience of end users of Drupal? Unless I am missing something, normal people never see these errors. Google is a search engine, it is not a user. In my experience, users remain unaware of this "problem". But changing Drupal to adhere to preferences of a broken crawler is not going to encourage anyone to fix their poorly implemented software either. As someone who appreciates the elegance of Drupal and uses it just as much as anyone, all this is fine with me -- as long as it is optional. But I don't think appeasement is the answer to "fixing" this problem, because with this option enabled there is no impetus for the crawler programmers to fix anything. And for the record, Google has been caching my pages correctly with CSS for months now and it has not entered into a loop either. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ Fri, 06 May 2005 19:37:37 +0000 : kbahey "If we cannot use accepted standards in Drupal, then what are good is it to adhere to them in the first place? " By using paths beginning with slashes, we are not breaking any standards that I know of. "Does this patch really affect the experience of end users of Drupal? Unless I am missing something, normal people never see these errors. " The clutter in the logs is very annoying, and makes makes it harder for the site admin to find the info he needs. It also consumes bandwidth. "Google is a search engine, it is not a user. " The user here is the site admin, not the end user. "But changing Drupal to adhere to preferences of a broken crawler is not going to encourage anyone to fix their poorly implemented software either ... But I don't think appeasement is the answer to "fixing" this problem, because with this option enabled there is no impetus for the crawler programmers to fix anything. " By the same token, we can ignore MS IE's broken CSS handling and a bunch of other things, and claim that they should fix themselves. Meanwhile 80% of users are facing these issues. That is not the way to look at things. If we can implement something that does not break standards but avoid many of us the grief that this causes, then why not? A solution that allows this to be turned on or off, via an option or a settings.php flag would make everyone happy. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ Sun, 08 May 2005 14:52:40 +0000 : killes@www.drop.org The patch apparently hasn't found much favour, setting to "active". I suggest to get hold of the IP ranges the broken crawlers use and block them in the .htaccess file we ship with Drupal. Long live open web standards! ------------------------------------------------------------------------ Sun, 08 May 2005 18:08:12 +0000 : kbahey It is really sad that most of us do not see a problem here, or brush it off as someone else's problem. Standards are only valid if everyone follows them. The reality is that some do not, and depending on the market presence and strengths of those in violation of the standard, they are insignificant to something that is to be dealt with. If web designers ignored Microsoft Internet Expolrer, with its blatant aloofness to standard, unintentional or otherwise, they would be out of business. 80% of people are still using MS IE. This is exactly the same issue. To see the magnitude of the problem, run the following SQL against your site:
select hostname from watchdog where type = 'httpd' and message like '%.css%';
select hostname, count(*) cnt from watchdog where type = 'httpd' and message like '%.css%' group by hostname order by cnt asc;
The first shows 5383 rows, the latter shows 1886 rows. As I said we will not be breaking any standards by qualifying our URLs and making them unambiguous to everyone, starting with the /. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ Sun, 08 May 2005 23:24:50 +0000 : clydefrog kbahey, have you contacted any of these crawlers to tell them their software is broken? ------------------------------------------------------------------------ Mon, 09 May 2005 01:30:18 +0000 : kbahey No. I haven't. There are 1866 unique IPs over the a period of 4 months. Even if we assume that these are in subnets, and say 10 per subnet, this means I have to contact 186 separate organizations/individuals, which is such a great effort. Even if I assume that there is skew, and that there are 20 organizations/individuals, it is still a great effort, and how many of those will respond, let alone fix their crawlers. The question is: what is within our control and influence and what is not. This is like writing CSS for MS IE and for other standard conforming browsers. Or like defensive driving in an area where there are many rogue drivers. You cannot say that you are conforming to css standards and hell with the rest of the world, and you will not deal with them at all. Nor can you say that you are within your lane, at the set speed and keeping your distance, and will cross a green light while a drunk person is crossing the intersection. We had to deal with comment spam (Google's nofollow, various modules to deal with it, or turning off anonymous comments, and moderating them), and referer spam (hide the statistics pages from view, or disabling statistics altogether). Didn't we? It is a rough world out there, and if the others are unethical or criminals or just don't play by the rules, we still have to deal with them. How is this any different? Seeing this as a purely external issue and not dealing with it in the software we control is unrealistic. Remember that the fix does not break any standards. We will still be standard compliant with it, so the standards slant of it is not convincing. Sorry, I just see it this way, and none of the counter arguments so far is convincing to me so far. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ Mon, 09 May 2005 02:04:28 +0000 : clydefrog This is not at all like MSIE. IE is a majority browser, so designing sites that don't work with it loses users. This, on the other hand, is a small minority of crawlers making a nuisance of themselves. The drunk driver analogy is a little bit closer, but this isn't a life or death situation. You've convinced me that you want this feature, but you haven't convinced me that I want this feature. If this is committed, *please* make it optional! ------------------------------------------------------------------------ Wed, 18 May 2005 00:14:56 +0000 : jayCampbell This issue interferes with BlogLines' ability to autodetect feeds. Several desktop clients have the same problem. While I agree that ideally this should be an optional change, losing 10% of your RSS readership is serious stuff. Thank you for the interim hide-saving, chx. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ Wed, 18 May 2005 03:18:56 +0000 : kbahey chx Was the patch updated for 4.6? I have applied only the common.inc. But since I am now using phptemplate based themes (pushbutton, and soon a custom one), can you please give some instructions on what to change (e.g. putting path_to_theme() in some places?) Thanks in advance. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ Wed, 01 Jun 2005 21:47:16 +0000 : njvack I've tested this with 4.6 -- one of the hunks didn't want to apply to common.inc; I think it was a line count off-by-one change or something, though -- I made the change by hand and it's working great. This patch hasn't found widespread acceptance... is it breaking things for some people? This feels like a better method of handling links than using BASE HREF, as far as I can feel. The way I see it is: Google is pretty good at indexing web pages. Not perfect, but I'm willing to believe they understand HTML better than I do. BASE HREF isn't a new part of the standard. At all. If Google doesn't support the way Drupal is trying to use BASE HREF, my money is that Google is right, and Drupal is using the tag in an unintended way. But anyhow, it's happy under 4.6 for me, so far. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ Sun, 19 Jun 2005 18:56:20 +0000 : mjr I just read through this thread because i have been beaten by the problem: I am in need for URLs relative to the server document root for different reasons. First, my server lives in a LAN behind a firewall. Since it runs several web apps, drupal in installed in a subdirectory of my document root. It is accessible from the outside solely via https and from inside the LAN under a different name, via https as well as using normal http (the latter is necessary to get cron.php working correctly, isn't it?) Secondly, run a clone of this site as a testing platform on my laptop, which obviously has its own URL and to be able to sync it with as little hassle as possible. IMHO this is very important - especially if You set up sites using many modules You will need to test Your setup somewhere else before going onto the production system. Thirdly, it prevents me from using http(s)://localhost/drupal46 or IP addresses to access the site. Fourthly i or some remote user will get hassle to mirror the site or parts of it into static pages (that's again the crawler problem). Such a situation has been discussed elsewhere in this forum multiple times, and the commonly accepted proposal was to use a relative path as a base URL, in my setting '/drupal46' (if i remember correctly, it is even in drupal's manual, isn't it?) --- although this will obviosly break the HTML-standard. Now comes the real problem: relative paths in are interpreted as intended by this hack by most relevant browsers: Mozilla et al., Opera, MSIE 5.x, Safari, even by exots like lynx and links, but there are a few ones that adhere strictly to standards in this respect, beside a few other exots like w3m and amaya MSIE 6.x also belongs to this group. Which means that my site is not accessible by 2/3 of the world. Really ugly. I am aware of using a multisite setup as a workaround, but seriously, why use a workaround which costs me administrative effort if a clean and standard conforming solution is at sight, namely avoiding the use of the tag in favour of using paths relative to the document root of my server or virtual host. So i would strongly vote for modifying drupal to drop using the tag. Although being part of HTML even before HTML 1.0 has been defined (always as an optional tag, BTW) it brings in more trouble than it helps. best regards Michael ------------------------------------------------------------------------ Mon, 22 Aug 2005 13:36:39 +0000 : Uwe Hermann What's the status of this issue? ------------------------------------------------------------------------ Mon, 22 Aug 2005 13:53:53 +0000 : Goba Now that we have /patch (code needs work)/, this is a perfect issue to put into that status. I would vote for the change provided by the latest patch in this issue, although I have not tested the patch myself. At least at weblabor.hu and drupal.hu, we run with a custom url() function which just does what this patch is about to do (but since these Drupal setups are in the root folder, we just prepend a slash to all path values). The patch [6] needs to be updated to latest CVS, and as Dries said [7] he is willing to fix this problem, it should be committed after a review. [6] http://drupal.org/node/13148#comment-19433 [7] http://drupal.org/node/13148#comment-16088 ------------------------------------------------------------------------ Mon, 22 Aug 2005 14:30:19 +0000 : chx Attachment: http://drupal.org/files/issues/base_kill.patch (8.25 KB) Reworked. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ Thu, 08 Sep 2005 15:59:30 +0000 : bergermann same patch for version 4.6.3 distributed files P L E A S E ... :-)