XMLHttpRequest issue on recent Firefox 3

Sylvain Fourmanoit

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Mar 1, 2008, 8:35:46 PM3/1/08

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I experience a small problem with recent Minefield builds; It seems the
XMLHttpRequest object does not want to parse retrieved XHTML documents
containing entities.

This page[1] doesn't trigger problem on FireFox 2.0.0.12, nor on Firefox 3
builds I have from around fifteen days ago, but I get "undefined entity"
errors on the console on current trunk (Gecko/2008030114
Minefield/3.0b4pre), and an empty XMLHttpRequest.responseXML tree.

If you remove the entities, everything is back to normal; is there
something wrong with this page, or is it a bug?

--
Sylvain

[1]http://fourmanoit.googlepages.com/test.html

Benjamin Hawkes-Lewis

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Mar 2, 2008, 5:36:20 AM3/2/08

to Sylvain Fourmanoit, dev-apps...@lists.mozilla.org

[snip]

> [1]http://fourmanoit.googlepages.com/test.html

Entities are defined in the DTD, but the DTD URL your document
references returns a 404. There's no such thing as XHTML 1.1 Strict.
Perhaps you meant:

<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Strict//EN"
"http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-strict.dtd">

It's perhaps also worth noting that XHTML 1.1 MUST not be served as
text/html and that your document does not follow all the compatibility
guidelines suggested for XHTML 1.0 documents served as text/html:

http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/#guidelines

--
Benjamin Hawkes-Lewis

Boris Zbarsky

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Mar 2, 2008, 12:24:42 PM3/2/08

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Sylvain Fourmanoit wrote:
> This page[1] doesn't trigger problem on FireFox 2.0.0.12, nor on Firefox
> 3 builds I have from around fifteen days ago, but I get "undefined
> entity" errors on the console on current trunk

Can you hunt down exactly when this changed (within one day, using the nightly
builds)? This sort of thing shouldn't be changing at this stage, I would think.

-Boris

Sylvain Fourmanoit

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Mar 2, 2008, 3:22:04 PM3/2/08

to Benjamin Hawkes-Lewis, dev-apps...@lists.mozilla.org

Benjamin Hawkes-Lewis wrote:
> Entities are defined in the DTD, but the DTD URL your document
> references returns a 404. There's no such thing as XHTML 1.1 Strict.

> Perhaps you meant: [XHTML 1.0 public doctype declaration]

My bad; corrected now.

> It's perhaps also worth noting that XHTML 1.1 MUST not be served as
> text/html

Isn't forcing the content type via XMLHttpRequest.overrideMimeType()
supposed to be enough[1]? Anyway, just to make sure, I did republish the
document twice, once as XHMTL 1.1 with the right DTD [2], the other time
as XHTML 1.0 Strict [3], this time served as "application/xhtml+xml"... No
luck so far.

Boris Zbarsky wrote:
> Can you hunt down exactly when this changed (within one day, using the
> nightly builds)? This sort of thing shouldn't be changing at this
> stage, I would think.

Node injection behavior seems to have changed on nightly builds from
February the 22nd, 2008[4]. Minefield didn't complain up to the 21st[5],
but does report:

Error: undefined entity Source File:
http://xmlhttprequesttest.googlecode.com/svn/trunk/test.html Line: 48,
Column: 35 Source Code:
(itself) containing entities¹…

...and return an empty XMLresponse tree since then. Yours,

--
Sylvain

[1]http://developer.mozilla.org/en/docs/XMLHttpRequest#overrideMimeType.28.29
[2]http://xmlhttprequesttest.googlecode.com/svn/trunk/test.html
[3]http://xmlhttprequesttest.googlecode.com/svn/trunk/test1.html
[4]http://ftp.mozilla.org/pub/mozilla.org/firefox/nightly/2008-02-22-04-trunk/
[5]http://ftp.mozilla.org/pub/mozilla.org/firefox/nightly/2008-02-21-04-trunk/

Boris Zbarsky

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Mar 2, 2008, 3:39:52 PM3/2/08

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Sylvain Fourmanoit wrote:
> Node injection behavior seems to have changed on nightly builds from
> February the 22nd, 2008[4]. Minefield didn't complain up to the 21st[5]

Thank you (especially for the links to the exact builds you used)!

I filed https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=420609 with a link to the
bug that regressed this and some analysis of what's going on.

-Boris