418305 - Make Yellow-Screen-Of-Death More Informative

Status: NEW

(Core :: XML, enhancement)

Description

[Jeff Schiller]

It would be great if the default XML processing gave a less painful "Yellow Screen of Death".  I would like to point to Opera as a better example:

- for elements missing end tags, Opera shows the element with surrounding markup for context as well as the tag upon which the error occurred (with surrounding markup for context)
- for invalid attributes, the markup is wrapped so the user can see the context and the element on the same screen (long lines make this horrible in Firefox)
- there is even an option to explicitly parse XHTML pages as HTML (not sure I would recommend this)

Comment 1

[Jeff Schiller]

The red highlighting aagainst a grey background is also a nice touch of Opera's

Comment 2

[Robert O'Callahan (:roc) (email my personal email if necessary)]

The View Source window actually provides an excellent display for helping the author resolve the error. Maybe we should just have a XUL error page with view-source in an IFRAME, scrolled to the error location.

Comment 3

[Jeff Schiller]

The view-source:<url>  is a good start _IF_ you can automatically scroll to where the error is.  Highlighting the character or token that caused the error would be a good second step...

Comment 4

[Jeff Schiller]

If highlighting the token is not possible in the Fx3 timeframe, you might consider making it a two-frame approach (upper third with the YSOD, lower two thirds with a view-source XUL frame scrolled to the error location)

Comment 5

[Axel Hecht [:Pike]]

I bet that it's outside of the scope of this bug, but xml parsing errors due to problems in l10n for about:neterror are rather common, and the given error message just refers to the source location in netError.xhtml where the DTD is included, not to the source location where the actual parsing error occured.

Comment 6

[Henri Sivonen (:hsivonen)]

I'd rather allocate effort into making an "XML5" than into improving the diagnostics of XML 1.0 Draconianness.