Quarto appears to change body-footer entry slightly

[bryanhanson]

I am using Goatcounter for web page analytics. I just figured out after a month that it is not working. Goatcounter says to put this on the page so it will be tracked:

<script data-goatcounter="https://chemospec.goatcounter.com/count" async src="//gc.zgo.at/count.js"></script>

So I put in my _quarto.yml the following:

website:
  body-footer: <script data-goatcounter="https://chemospec.goatcounter.com/count" async src="//gc.zgo.at/count.js"></script>

But when the body-footer entry is actually put on the page Quarto changes it just a bit:

<script data-goatcounter="https://chemospec.goatcounter.com/count" async="" src="../..//gc.zgo.at/count.js"></script>

Any suggestions for doing this differently? Or is there a bug in how body-footer is being parsed?

Full repo is here Last updated around 3 May using then-current Quarto. However, I don't see any discussion of body-footer in either issues or discussions that I can find since that time.

[cscheid]

I haven't attempted a full repro, but I suspect there are two potential issues here, one of which looks like a straight quarto bug (or at least misfeature):

1. Pandoc appears to be converting async to async="", which might behave badly. MDN describes the behavior of async as "... if the async attribute is present", which to me implies thta this should not cause any problems. But I don't know if web browsers will interpret async="" as async="false" or something like that.

2. Quarto is interpreting paths starting with // as (what we call) a "root-relative path", and translating them to a path that resolves to a location as if /gc.zgo.at/count.js existed as a file in the project. This seems to me to be a clear quarto bug (or misfeature). // means "use the same scheme as the current request, but go to a different server". The spec is here. This exists so that requests behave correctly under both HTTP and HTTPS. Clearly we're misbehaving here. With that said, you should be able to work around it by explicitly writing https:// or http://, depending on how your file will be served.

Thanks for the report! I'll file a bug for the second point, but file handling is a finicky part of quarto and we're hoping not to make big changes between now and 1.0.

(cc @jjallaire)

[jjallaire]

@cscheid your diagnosis (and suggested workaround) are right on. I think this will be an easy fix for us (we have a function that checks for external URLs that just needs to be made a bit smarter)

[cscheid]

Cool. I should be able to fix that later today.

[bryanhanson]

You all are the best! Thank you.

[jjallaire]

Should be resolved here: fb6a2a4

[bryanhanson]

Looks right (with async=“”), I will report w/i a day or two if the counter is working. Thank you!

…

On Jun 5, 2022, at 4:27 PM, J.J. Allaire ***@***.***> wrote: Should be resolved here: fb6a2a4 <fb6a2a4> — Reply to this email directly, view it on GitHub <#1058 (comment)>, or unsubscribe <https://github.com/notifications/unsubscribe-auth/AABCIPV3EB2PGMQ2V557CY3VNUZULANCNFSM5X2XHKYQ>. You are receiving this because you authored the thread.

[bryanhanson]

The Goatcounter is working correctly. Thanks so much!