quote handling in front matter title incorrect

[dret]

https://github.com/dret/webconcepts/blob/gh-pages/specs/IETF/RFC/6271.md uses jekyll front matter and has quotes in the title. it thus escapes those quotes. http://webconcepts.info/specs/IETF/RFC/6271 is the web view of that. while the HTML body//h1 title is correct, the HTML head//title incorrectly escapes the escaped quote. this results in browser displaying the page title incorrectly, for example in tabs or in the history.
steps to reproduce are to simply create a jekyll page with an escaped quote in a quoted title in the front matter. i see this bug on my locally installed jekyll 3.1.6, as well as on github.

[jake-low]

Hi @dret, thanks for the bug report!

I wasn't able to reproduce this on my own site, so I cloned yours and poked around. I think the issue is that your head.html include, which comes from the theme you're using (jekyll/minima) uses an escape filter when setting the page title.

<title>{% if page.title %}{{ page.title | escape }}{% else %}{{ site.title | escape }}{% endif %}</title>

This takes the ampersands in the page title and escapes them again, causing the mangled title you're seeing.

The minima theme is doing this so that you don't have to; it's designed so that you can use HTML-unsafe characters in your title strings without worry. But since you're escaping "manually" it escapes your escapes, which isn't what you want.

I think your best bet is to write your titles as plain, un-escaped strings, and let Jekyll take care of escaping them where necessary. In this case, you could make this change:

- title:  "The Atom "deleted-entry" Element"
+ title:  "The Atom \"deleted-entry\" Element"

Or even this:

- title:  "The Atom "deleted-entry" Element"
+ title:  The Atom "deleted-entry" Element

... since Liquid YAML doesn't require quotes around strings.

Hope this is helpful!

[dret]

On 2016-07-30 18:41, Jake Low wrote:

Hi @dret https://github.com/dret, thanks for the bug report!

and thanks a lot for the detailed response!

• title: "The Atom "deleted-entry" Element"
• title: "The Atom "deleted-entry" Element"

dret/webconcepts@b5efe07
is doing this and seems to work. thanks for the suggestion.

• title: "The Atom "deleted-entry" Element"
• title: The Atom "deleted-entry" Element

this did not work (i would have preferred it) because it created some
problems with other characters in titles. but having one working
solution definitely is good enough. thanks!

[parkr]

Glad you got this sorted! We're at the mercy of Liquid and YAML here, sadly. :/

[dret]

i guess that's what you get yourself into when you happily mix markup languages a la YAML and HTML and MD. thanks for your help on this one!

[parkr]

@dret happily! and thanks to @jake-low 😄