The Continue button isn't selectable in w3m for sso login

This is causing the IS team some inconveniences so raising the priority and assigning to the 2.4.0 release. If it's not the easy fix which it seems, we'll re-assess.

It seems to be a bug with w3m that doesn't recognize / support the <button> tag. See bug #15368 and http://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=136810

We could work around the bug by not using <button> tags and switch back to <input type="button">, though much of our theming would have to be redone.

Since it's a w3m problem, we can work around it somehow. Doesn't seem worth changing the theme just to get a particular non-standards-compliant browser to work.

Extra edge case for this bug. If desktop users lose their desktop do to a crash, they are told to hit Ctrl-Alt-F1 login into the session and run "ubuntu-bug unity/xorg" etc. This then triggers w3m as the default web browser and the user can not login to launchpad to complete the bug report.

We'll look into serving content to w3m a special case, so to work around the bug in that browser.

From bug #628755 (a duplicate of this bug):

> W3M actually supports buttons. I think this is a bug in
> login.launchpad.net that uses:
>
> <button type="submit" ...>Continue
>
> instead of:
>
> <input type="submit" ...>Continue

According to the w3c html4 spec, <button type="submit"> is valid and should behave as <input type="submit">. See:

http://www.w3.org/TR/html4/interact/forms.html#h-17.5

I agree this is a w3m bug. What I wanted to say is that there's no need
to special case w3m: you can just replace the <button> tag with <input>
and every browser will work without problems.

On Fri, 2010-10-15 at 13:28 +0000, Stuart Metcalfe wrote:
> According to the w3c html4 spec, <button type="submit"> is valid and
> should behave as <input type="submit">. See:
>
> http://www.w3.org/TR/html4/interact/forms.html#h-17.5

Unfortunately browsers provide different level of styling capabilities for <input type="submit"> and <button type="submit">.

I've uploaded w3m 0.5.2-10 in Debian unstable, which supports
the button element to login Launchpad.

Great work Tatsuya!

Do you think we can get a backport for Lucid Lynx (10.04) / Maverick Meerkat
(10.10) as well? Or even the diffs which enable that appropriate element
support in w3m?

Since 11.04 will sync from Debian soon, and people will have a working w3m
there is no need for a backport.

Only 10.04 and 10.10 will be supported for any length of time, respectively
at least 3 years and 18 months.

Although 09.10 is supported until 11.04 - I don't see the value in
backporting for it.

Regards,
Anand

On Sat, Oct 16, 2010 at 3:16 PM, Tatsuya Kinoshita <email address hidden> wrote:

> I've uploaded w3m 0.5.2-10 in Debian unstable, which supports
> the button element to login Launchpad.
>
> --
> The Continue button isn't selectable in w3m for sso login
> https://bugs.launchpad.net/bugs/523229
> You received this bug notification because you are a direct subscriber
> of a duplicate bug (645024).
>
> Status in Canonical SSO provider: Confirmed
>
> Bug description:
> Server editions recommend using w3m as a browser.
>
> I tested login.c.c and it failed due to the fact that the continue button
> isn't selectable. This means you can add your username and password but not
> carry on past that screen.
>
> Everything else about the form seems to be fine other than that.
>
> To unsubscribe from this bug, go to:
>
> https://bugs.launchpad.net/canonical-identity-provider/+bug/523229/+subscribe
>
>

> Do you think we can get a backport for Lucid Lynx (10.04) / Maverick Meerkat
> (10.10) as well? Or even the diffs which enable that appropriate element
> support in w3m?

The patch to support the button element is
<debian/patches/020_button.patch> in w3m 0.5.2-10.

Probably, it is not cleanly applied to 10.04 / 10.10, but you may
manually modify the rejected hunks.

Back to "Won't fix" for SSO as this has now been fixed in w3m. Thanks to Tatsuya and everyone else involved.

This has been fixed in Ubuntun 10.04 LTS with a backport or update to w3m?

Anand

On Sun, Nov 14, 2010 at 4:31 PM, Stuart Metcalfe <
<email address hidden>> wrote:

> Back to "Won't fix" for SSO as this has now been fixed in w3m. Thanks
> to Tatsuya and everyone else involved.
>
> ** Changed in: canonical-identity-provider
> Status: Confirmed => Won't Fix
>
> --
> The Continue button isn't selectable in w3m for sso login
> https://bugs.launchpad.net/bugs/523229
> You received this bug notification because you are a direct subscriber
> of a duplicate bug (645024).
>
> Status in Canonical SSO provider: Won't Fix
>
> Bug description:
> Server editions recommend using w3m as a browser.
>
> I tested login.c.c and it failed due to the fact that the continue button
> isn't selectable. This means you can add your username and password but not
> carry on past that screen.
>
> Everything else about the form seems to be fine other than that.
>
> To unsubscribe from this bug, go to:
>
> https://bugs.launchpad.net/canonical-identity-provider/+bug/523229/+subscribe
>
>

@Stuart, this hasn't been fixed in existing releases of w3m - specifically Ubuntu LTS 10.04 - 0.5.2-2.1ubuntu1.1 doesn't contain the fix.

While I'm very sympathetic to not having to do sniffing, it seems prudent to me to implement the sniffing to cater for machines with plain LTS 10.04.

Per discussion with Stuart, I'm trying to find someone to backport the w3m changes to Lucid, or at least help us to do so.

See bug 683337

Just to confirm that this has fixed the issue on natty.

@Dave, I've added a task for ubuntu, you might want to nominate it to lucid.