1277873 - Inspector/HTML editor documentation is misleading - does not adequately reflect the caveats of the tool and its capabilites

Status: RESOLVED WONTFIX

(Developer Documentation Graveyard :: Developer Tools, defect, P5)

Description

[Codacoder]

:: Developer Documentation Request

      Request Type: Correction
     Gecko Version: unspecified
 Technical Contact: 

:: Details

As is well documented by a series of bugs, the Inspector does *not* "show the HTML of the page" - it's a representation of what is in the DOM which can be very different to the page's original HTML source.  In addition, the HTML editing capability suffers from the same problem, viz:

Using the HTML editing option, enter the follow HTML:

<div>&emsp;$lt;&equiv;&gt;&emsp;</div>

Now decide to edit it and make a minor change - not possible, the div's content is *gone*.

The same is true of original, loaded source: entities, unicode code points (and I suspect other mechanisms) are lost once the original has been added to the DOM.  All you get in the Inspector is the interpreted and evaluated version.

References:

https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=967493 and https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=967493#c13

https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=839818#c4

The proposal here is a half-way "solution" :
https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1277828

Comment 1

[BMO Automation]

MDN Web Docs' bug reporting has now moved to GitHub. From now on, please file content bugs at https://github.com/mdn/sprints/issues/ and platform bugs at https://github.com/mdn/kuma/issues/.