9850 - {dom1}createEntityReference returning null

Status: RESOLVED WONTFIX

(Core :: DOM: Core & HTML, defect, P2)

Description

[David Baron :dbaron: (⌚️UTC-4, no longer working on Mozilla)]

document.createEntityReference is returning null in an XML document.  It should
be supported.

Observed: Running the above test case gives one error message:
"TEST(S) OMITTED: entref is null."

Expected: Test runs to end.

Comment 1

[Mike Shaver (:shaver -- probably not reading bugmail closely)]

Do we need this for beta?

Comment 2

[Mike Shaver (:shaver -- probably not reading bugmail closely)]

HTML DOM bugs are M11/P2 for Vidur.

Comment 3

[ekrock's old account (dead)]

Moving to M14.

Comment 4

[vidur (gone)]

Handing this one to Nisheeth pending a decision what to do with entity
references and expat.

Comment 5

[Nisheeth Ranjan]

Bulk moving all M14 non-beta stopper bugs to M17...

Comment 6

[Nisheeth Ranjan]

Moving bugs out by one milestone...

Comment 7

[Nisheeth Ranjan]

Move back into M17...

Comment 8

[Nisheeth Ranjan]

I meant move back into M16...

Comment 9

[Nisheeth Ranjan]

Johnny, regardless of whether we decide to pass up entity refernces in expat, 
document.createEntityReference() needs to be implemented so that entitities 
defined in the internal subset of an XML document can be created through the 
DOM.

Should I re-assign this bug to you?

Comment 10

[Johnny Stenback (:jst)]

Are we (in the content sink) given a list of entities defined in the internal
subset? If we are, then supporting creation of references to text (without
markup) or character entities defined in the internal subset (or external subset
for that matter, as long as we're given a list or the defined entities) is
trivial, but supporting creation of references to entities that contain markup
is not as easy, we need to get the DOM tree (ie parse the replacement text) for
the content in the entity we're referensing, same goes for external entities,
but that's even harder since the external file might need to be parsed,
preferably synchronously, and that's not something we can easily do right now
in mozilla AFAIK.

To have a general and clean sollution for this bug I think we need to have bug
15119 (script way of loading XML...), if we had this we could simply use that
service to always parse the entity replacement text, or we could use that
service to load the external file that the entity points to.

What are the plans for bug 15119, do you have any plans for that? Once that is
fixed I'd be glad to take over this bug :)

Comment 11

[Nisheeth Ranjan]

Hi Johnny,

I'm passing this to you for now.  Bug 15119 is fixed but you also need:

a) bug 15118 fixed, and
b) a way to generate a DOM from a string

before you can implement this.  I'll try to work on a) and b) next...

Comment 12

[Mike]

M16 has been out for a while now, these bugs target milestones need to be 
updated.

Comment 13

[Johnny Stenback (:jst)]

Nominating this for nsbeta3.

Comment 14

[ekrock's old account (dead)]

correctness of DOM1 implementation.

Comment 15

[Nisheeth Ranjan]

Marking nsbeta3- for now...

Comment 16

[Jan Carpenter]

Mass update of qa contact

Comment 17

[Jan Carpenter]

Nominating for rtm

Comment 18

[Nisheeth Ranjan]

We will not be able to implement this functionality until post Netscape 6.0.
Marking rtm- and futuring.

Comment 19

[Prashant Desale]

QA contact Update

Comment 20

[Prashant Desale]

Updating QA contact to Shivakiran Tummala.

Comment 21

[Sivakiran Tummala]

nominating for nsbeta1, the main purpose of this method is defeated. I think 
this missed major milestones.

Comment 22

[Johnny Stenback (:jst)]

Mass-reassigning bugs to [e-mail]

Comment 23

[Arunan Balasubramaniam]

The test URL
(http://www.fas.harvard.edu/~dbaron/dom/test/one-core-xml/EntityReference) is no
longer valid.

Comment 24

[Boris Zbarsky [:bzbarsky]]

*** Bug 41286 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***

Comment 25

[Boris Zbarsky [:bzbarsky]]

*** Bug 36870 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***

Comment 26

[Alan Thomas]

11 years later, document.createEntityReference is still poorly supported by other browsers. IE9 (so far) and Opera don't even implement it. Chrome tries hard, but its implementation is broken.

Comment 27

[Nochum Sossonko [:Natch]]

Removing helpwanted since this is being removed in bug 611983. This won't make 2.0 afaict.

Comment 28

[:Ms2ger (he/him; ⌚ UTC+1/+2)]

Removed support altogether.