"HTTP" in topic name causes link problem

[Ed Hawco]

Hello. This is just a situation report to add to the general knowledge base. I don't need any assistance with this, I just want to report the phenomenon in case it is useful for someone else.

Situation: I had a topic called "HTTP Live Streaming."

Everything worked fine when I published to HTML, and no errors were reported. If you clicked the "HTTP Live Streaming" item in the TOC, it would jump to that topic. BUT! If you copied the link (as reported at the bottom of the page, e.g., https://mysite.com/help/index.html?http-livestreaming.htm ) it would not jump to the topic; it would go to the default topic (i.e., the landing page).

I could find no problem with the link, so on a hunch I changed the topic ID from "http-livestreaming" to "hls" (i.e., I removed "http" as the first four characters). That fixed it.

It seems that having a topic ID start with "http" confuses the browser, as it thinks it's going to be a full URL and not just a topic ID. I tested this on two browsers (Chrome and Firefox) and the problem occurred in both and was fixed in both when I changed the topic ID.

File this under "FYI."

[Tim Green]

Hi Ed,

Which skin are you using? In some skins the choice on how a link is going to be handled is made on the basis of whether it is a topic link or a web link, and that is made by looking for the http(s) protocol identifier. However, I tested this with a couple of different skins and I can't reproduce what you describe with pasting the URL to a topic like that, so I'd like to know where it is happening.

What I did discover is that if you have a topic link like this in the V2 WebHelp skins from the Premium Pack, an internal topic link will open the topic in a new browser window. The link is being misinterpreted as a web link there, because the script is only checking for http(s) and not also for the following :// character sequence. That will be corrected in the next update.

[Ed Hawco]

Interesting. I'm using the HM7-Help-Webhelp-Responsive skin (non-premium pack).

[Tim Green]

Hi Ed,

Could you mail me a small demo project at support AT ec-software.com (replace the AT with @) so that I can test it? I really need just the affected two topics.

Have a nice weekend!