Issue status update for http://drupal.org/node/13148 Project: Drupal Version: cvs Component: base system Category: bug reports Priority: normal Assigned to: Anonymous Reported by: kbahey Updated by: kbahey Status: patch Can this patch be applied for 4.6? it is really badly needed. kbahey Previous comments: ------------------------------------------------------------------------ November 18, 2004 - 22:29 : 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/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/xtemplate/pushbutton/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! ------------------------------------------------------------------------ November 19, 2004 - 23:10 : 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. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ November 19, 2004 - 23:35 : 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. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ November 20, 2004 - 04:55 : 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 :) ------------------------------------------------------------------------ November 20, 2004 - 05:19 : Dries Goba is right. We need paths relative to the domain name to fix this 'problem'. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ November 20, 2004 - 15:19 : 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? ------------------------------------------------------------------------ November 21, 2004 - 11:24 : chx Attachment: http://drupal.org/files/issues/common_inc_patch.txt (471 bytes) I have implemented what Goba suggested. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ November 21, 2004 - 11:43 : chx Attachment: http://drupal.org/files/issues/common_inc_patch_0.txt (825 bytes) Maybe this one is faster? ------------------------------------------------------------------------ November 21, 2004 - 12:34 : 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 ------------------------------------------------------------------------ November 21, 2004 - 19:28 : 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'] . '/' ); ?> ------------------------------------------------------------------------ November 27, 2004 - 23:08 : kbahey Did this patch make it into CVS yet? If there are any objections to it, can someone please explain what they are? Thanks ------------------------------------------------------------------------ November 28, 2004 - 04:33 : 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. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ November 28, 2004 - 13:54 : 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? ------------------------------------------------------------------------ November 28, 2004 - 14:26 : 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... ------------------------------------------------------------------------ November 28, 2004 - 18:06 : 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. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ December 2, 2004 - 15:31 : 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. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ December 2, 2004 - 16:15 : 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. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ December 2, 2004 - 17:07 : 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. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ December 9, 2004 - 10:31 : Goba Please commit this into Drupal core, this fix is badly needed. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ January 17, 2005 - 08:00 : 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. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ January 17, 2005 - 08:09 : 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. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ January 17, 2005 - 11:03 : 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 ------------------------------------------------------------------------ January 17, 2005 - 11:57 : 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? ------------------------------------------------------------------------ January 17, 2005 - 12:38 : 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. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ January 17, 2005 - 13:35 : 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. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ January 17, 2005 - 16:36 : 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. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ January 17, 2005 - 16:48 : 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). ------------------------------------------------------------------------ January 17, 2005 - 16:54 : 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... ------------------------------------------------------------------------ January 17, 2005 - 17:34 : 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 ------------------------------------------------------------------------ January 18, 2005 - 02:14 : 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. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ February 1, 2005 - 18:33 : 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 ------------------------------------------------------------------------ February 1, 2005 - 18:37 : 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. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ February 2, 2005 - 18:40 : 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? ------------------------------------------------------------------------ February 17, 2005 - 09:50 : kbahey This patch is badly needed. The lack of a leading / in many paths is causing lots of problems.