204000 - setAttribute('multiple', 'multiple') on an select element does not give an select element with attribute&value pair multiple="multiple"

Status: RESOLVED FIXED

(Core :: DOM: Core & HTML, defect)

Description

[Brian Donovan]

User-Agent:       Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i686; en-US; rv:1.4a) Gecko/20030401
Build Identifier: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i686; en-US; rv:1.4a) Gecko/20030401

 I'm working on a JavaScript class that uses the DOM to create forms on the fly
and discovered that I could not set the multiple attribute of SELECT elements to
"multiple" (considered XHTML best practice) or, in fact, to any other value.

The simplest way of reproducing this phenom is to create a select element, set
the multiple attribute, then check it :

var nodeSelect = document.createElement('select');
nodeSelect.setAttribute('multiple', 'multiple');
alert('value of multiple attribute : ' + nodeSelect.getAttribute('multiple'));

nodeSelect.getAttribute('multiple') returns only an empty string...

Also see the selected=selected bug (#203751 :
http://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=203751) - similar problem. Moz is
setting the attribute values to empty strings.

Reproducible: Always

Steps to Reproduce:

Comment 1

[Boris Zbarsky [:bzbarsky]]

Looks like <select> implements StringToAttribute but not AttributeToString. 
Hence the problem -- StringToAttribute just sets the HTMLValue to the empty
string for boolean HTML attrs.

We may want some semi-general solution for this (eg <img> elements have the same
problem with "ismap", and I suspect it's just a problem all over).

Sicking?  Care to roll this into your rewrite?

Comment 2

[Fabian Guisset]

See my comment in bug 203751, same analysis as bz, it's a general problem, so we
need a general solution :-)

Comment 3

[Jonas Sicking (:sicking) No longer reading bugmail consistently]

Hmm.. IMHO the correct solution for this is to not let StringToAttribute have
any special handling for "boolean" attributes. Then we should only check that
the attribute exists rather then check its value (which might be what we already
do).

Enforcing that the value of "multiple" is "multiple" IMHO falls under
validation, but i coule be convinced of otherwise.

Comment 4

[Boris Zbarsky [:bzbarsky]]

sicking, sounds good to me.

Comment 5

[Boris Zbarsky [:bzbarsky]]

Fixed by the checkin for bug 232706