386250 - xpath queries in mozilla are not portable

Status: RESOLVED INVALID

(Core :: XML, defect)

Description

[Dietrich Ayala (:dietrich)]

xpath queries in mozilla are not portable: they're not valid against the same document outside of our impl)

possibly because of our dom "fixup"?

doug, can you dupe this, or add more details about what you found in the joey work?

Comment 1

[Doug Turner (:dougt)]

thanks for flying this.  I am not sure it is a bug per se, but rather a feature request.

Basically what I am trying to do is:

1) render a page in ff.
2) build an xpath to a given element (A) in ff.
3) send that xpath and url to page to a server.
4) on the server, build a dom document to the url sent.
5) apply the xpath to get the element selected in step 2.


I am using PHP5 on the server.

what I had to do was construct an xpath looking string in firefox instead of using something more standard.

It seams that not all documents are the same, we add a bunch of extra stuff that other parsers dont....  

What I am looking for is a solution -- a canonical xpath.


The code that generates this xpath looking string is here:

http://svn.mozilla.org/labs/joey/trunk/addons/ff/chrome/content/joey/joeyOverlay.js


see joey_buildXPath()

Comment 2

[Peter Van der Beken [:peterv]]

(In reply to comment #1)
> What I am looking for is a solution -- a canonical xpath.

So is this a duplicate of bug 319768?

Comment 3

[Chris Shoemaker]

I don't think this is a valid bug.  If it is, it's more DOM-related than XML-related.  It's easy to generate a canonical xpath for the fixed-up DOM.  The OP is a complaint that that path doesn't work some other parser's version of the original document.  That's no surprise, because it's a different document.  If you want to use the path with some other parser, you also need to parse the same document.  In this case, it's the in-memory document represented by the DOM.  Canonical paths with that document are portable.

Note: There is one gotcha:  Element.normalize should be called on elements before generating the canonical paths.