Hidden trouble

I stumbled onto an interesting Panther bug today involving Safari 1.1.1 (v100.1) and Panther (MacOS X 10.3.2 — 7D24).

In a nutshell, drag and drop from the Safari address bar (well? area? thingy?) works really well under most circumstances for passing URL data to most drag aware applications, including the Finder where the drag creates links (.webloc files) with the title of the link taken from the title of the page. I subsequently tested with OmniWeb and FireFox. OmniWeb had the same problem and FireFox uses the URL as the name (so it sort of doesn't count — does it?)

Today I was doing my normal thing (which is normally several things at once) and went looking for some information about using Oracle's dbca application on MacOS X (I came up empty so that'll have to wait until I get back from vacation). In the process I found a page with some useful Oracle related information and dragged the link to the desktop, something I do many times per day, every day. Although I had a lot of clutter, I didn't think I saw the visual feedback I expected from the file creation. I shoved a bunch of stuff out of way (hiding everything but the browser), couldn't find the file, assumed operator error and dragged the link to the Finder desktop again. Nothing. Hmm, this seemed odd so I switched to Finder and back to Safari and tried it one more time. I was batting a nice round .000 thus far.

At this point I was a little miffed but also curious.

I switched to Finder and opened my desktop link to a links directory (I shovel 'em in there on a constant basis and run a little clean up script from time to time which moves them around into dated directories). Anyway, I didn't know what was wrong with the desktop but knew that I'd never encountered a problem creating a link in a directory window. Drag once, nothing. Drag again, still nothing. At this point I was really puzzled.

Off to terminal to poke around. The problem was instantly obvious. Back to Safari once again to make sure I wasn't seeing things and sure enough, the title was the problem. Many (most) Mac users leave invisible files setting alone in the Finder (self included) and it's not easily toggled (it is an all or nothing operation for the most part) and any name which begins with a period ('.') is by default in unix systems, invisible. So, a page with a title of ".com blah blah blah" will never show up. This silly page should give you everything you need to duplicate my problem (with a name that's not mangled all to hell like the one I ended up with).