[Bug 52313] New: HTML Email Notifications - Text snippets have weird characters

[bugzilla-daemon]

https://bugzilla.wikimedia.org/show_bug.cgi?id=52313

       Web browser: ---
            Bug ID: 52313
           Summary: HTML Email Notifications - Text snippets have weird
                    characters
           Product: MediaWiki extensions
           Version: unspecified
          Hardware: All
                OS: All
            Status: NEW
          Severity: normal
          Priority: Unprioritized
         Component: Echo
          Assignee: wikibugs-l@lists.wikimedia.org
          Reporter: fflo...@wikimedia.org
                CC: agarr...@wikimedia.org, bs...@wikimedia.org
    Classification: Unclassified
   Mobile Platform: ---

Created attachment 13024
  --> https://bugzilla.wikimedia.org/attachment.cgi?id=13024&action=edit
HTML-Email-Notification-Weird-Characters-Bug.png

Some HTML Email notifications show weird characters in text snippets for talk
page messages. 

Here are two examples from recent emails: 

• 

—

This seems to happen when the original message includes special HTML codes. For
example, here is the wiki markup for the first example (&#8226, see attached):

'Testing HTML email notifications. Yay, <font style="font-family:Georgia,
serif;">[[User:Steven Walling|Steven Walling]]&nbsp;&bull;&nbsp;[[User
talk:Steven Walling|<span style="color: #8080b0">talk</span>]]</font>  20:15,
30 July 2013 (UTC)'

... which caused the HTML Email to display:

'Testing HTML email notifications. Yay, &#8226; ['

So in this case, the weird characters were triggered by this the offending HTML
code:

'<font style="font-family:Georgia, serif;">'

My proposed resolution for this issue is to not display in the notification any
sentence that includes any such HTML characters -- and just show three dots
instead ('...').

This text snippet is only provided as a convenience, as the preceding
notification sentence carries all the essential information and links. Most
notifications will not have any text snippets, so this is more of an edge case.
Therefore, it seems more effective to omit non-essential information that could
confuse the user for no good reason.

-- 
You are receiving this mail because:
You are the assignee for the bug.
You are on the CC list for the bug.
_______________________________________________
Wikibugs-l mailing list
Wikibugs-l@lists.wikimedia.org
https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikibugs-l