Interesting Problem Rendering Page

[Chris Thielen <chris luethy net>]

I'm using Epiphany 1.8.5 under Gnome 2.12 on FreeBSD 6.0/i386.

I noticed that on the emusic.com website, the "Release Date" section for
albums has been appearing like a full Oracle timestamp, like: "Tue Mar
14 12:42:00 2006", when the release date is supposed to read "Mar 14,
2006".

I contacted emusic.com initially thinking this was just a problem on
their side, like they forgot to run the timestamp through some
formatting function before displaying it on a page, but to my surprise,
they said they couldn't reproduce it.

I checked again, using Epiphany 1.8.5, and the erroneous timestamp was
still there. I then booted up Firefox 1.5, which to the best of my
knowledge, should be using the same Gecko rendering engine as Epiphany
1.8.5 (unless Epiphany is using a slightly older version, I have no
idea, I didn't compile Epiphany or Firefox myself), and to my surprise
Firefox 1.5 displayed the correct timestamp, "Tue Mar 14, 2006"!

I checked multiple albums and the consistent behavior is that Epiphany
is showing these long timestamps while Firefox is not. I looked at the
page source handed out by the emusic.com server and it's not using any
sort of Javascript function to compute that date, which was my first
guess at why it should be different, but it actually appears
"hard-coded", like the output of any PHP or ColdFusion script would
appear to be.

I contacted emusic technical support again and explained the problem,
letting them know that it only existed in Epiphany and not Firefox, and
they said to get in contact with you, and that if you decide to look
into it, they'd be interested in hearing from you (you, the Epiphany
team).

Here's the full e-mail from emusic.com concerning this problem:
Hello,

Thank you for contacting eMusic Customer Support.

If you's like to contact them, please do.  You can include this email in
your contact.  I'd be interested in hearing from them.

Regards,

Josh
eMusic Customer Support Team



--Original Message--
From:   chris luethy net
Date:   03/14/06
To:     service emusic com
Subject:        Re: RE:Website Issues [#2425394]

I am still seeing the timestamps, but curiously enough it seems to be
limited to the Epiphany web browser that comes with many Linux/*BSD
systems. I also have Firefox installed and, when using that browser, I
do not see the timestamps, only the correctly formatted dates.

So, I do not see the problem in Firefox, only in Epiphany, which is
quite odd seeing as Epiphany uses the same Gecko rendering engine that
Firefox uses.

If you think this is something for the Epiphany web browser team, I can
contact them about it.

Thanks!
Chris Thielen

On Tue, 2006-03-14 at 09:15 -0500, service emusic com wrote:
> Hello,
> 
> Thank you for contacting eMusic Customer Support.
> 
> I'm not seeing the timestamp at this point.  If you're still seeing
it, please let me know.
> 
> Regards,
> 
> Josh
> eMusic Customer Support Team
> 
> 
> 
> --Original Message--
> From: chris luethy net
> Date: 03/14/06
> To:   service emusic com
> Subject:      Website Issues[#2425394]
> 
> Ticket ID: 
> First Name: Christopher
> Last Name: Thielen
> Email Address: chris luethy net
> Phone Number: 
> Operating System: Other
> Drop Down: Cable/DSL
> 
> ----------------------------------------------
> Contents:
> 
> Recently (in the last few days), various albums (I think all albums)
have been showing a "Release Date" containing extraneous information.
For example:
> 
> (copy & paste from an emusic page)
> Artist: Ran Blake
> Release Date: Tue Mar 07 00:00:00 EST 2006
> Genre: Jazz
> Label: Tompkins Square
> 
> It could just be my preference, but formatting the date to include
such erroneous date like 00:00:00 EST doesn't look as good as the
previous method the website used to present release dates.
> 
> Thanks!
> 
> 
> Browser:
> Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; FreeBSD i386; en-US; rv:1.8.0.1) Gecko/20060303
Epiphany/1.8.5 Firefox/1.5.0.1
> 
> 

Let me know if you guys decide to look into it. I am not on the
epiphany-list mailing list, so I'm assuming I won't hear any replies
back, so if you could CC me in any discussion on this, I'd appreciate
it.

Let me know if you guys are looking into this slight cosmetic anomaly.

Thanks,
Chris Thielen