138767 - Form field content appears to be shifted

Status: VERIFIED DUPLICATE of bug 127847

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

Description

[Alessandro Staltari]

From Bugzilla Helper:
User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.0; en-US; rv:0.9.9) Gecko/20020311
BuildID:    2002031104

Form field content appears to be shifted (i.e. content that shold appear in
field x is shown in field x+1).

"Quando vuoi partire?" [When do you want to go?] fields that should contain a
date dd/mm/yyyy and "A che ora?" [What time you want to go?] should contain
current time hh:mm, instead date fileds show [empty]/dd/mm and time fields show
yyyy:hh.

Not sure if really a bug or webmaster fault, however it is shown correctly in IE5.

Reproducible: Always
Steps to Reproduce:
Just load the page.

Actual Results:  See "Description"

Expected Results:  See "Description"

Plugins :

File name: C:\Programmi\mozilla.org\Mozilla\plugins\NPSWF32.dll
Shockwave Flash 5.0 r41

application/x-shockwave-flash
application/futuresplash

Comment 1

[Kai Lahmann (is there, where MNG is)]

same on Opera.. maybe sucking HTML? or better: does it work anywhere?

Comment 2

[Boris Zbarsky [:bzbarsky]]

Fails in NS4 and IE too.  In fact, the designer just doesn't realize that the
array is 0-based, not 1-based. 

Comment 3

[Phil Schwartau]

Boris: thanks. Marking Verified; the code at the site does this:

document.forms[0].elements[4].value = giorno;
document.forms[0].elements[5].value = mese;
document.forms[0].elements[6].value = parseInt(anno,10);


but if we enter these javascript:URLs at the site, we get this:

javascript: alert(document.forms[0].elements[3].name)  --->  "datag" 
javascript: alert(document.forms[0].elements[4].name)  --->  "datam"
javascript: alert(document.forms[0].elements[5].name)  --->  "dataa""

Comment 4

[Alessandro Staltari]

On my home PC with IE5 works.

The page is taken from italian railways site (yea, you may laugh now ;-) that 
is used by thousands of people every day. If there were nobody to get it work, 
it should never published.

The main page of the site is http://www.trenitalia.com.
The page in the English version of the site works with IE and Mozilla too, but 
the Italian version works with IE but not in Mozilla (very odd :-)

Comment 5

[Alessandro Staltari]

I reopened the bug just to ensure you know the page works with IE.
Probalby it is a badly designed page, but maybe you may evaluate to do an 
additial check after you read my comment #4.

Comment 6

[Phil Schwartau]

Alessandro is correct; the given site does work in IE6. 
Here's why: for both IE and Mozilla, the code does this:

document.forms[0].elements[4].value = giorno;
document.forms[0].elements[5].value = mese;
document.forms[0].elements[6].value = parseInt(anno,10);


But if we enter these javascript:URLs at the site, we get this:

IN MOZILLA
javascript: alert(document.forms[0].elements[0].name)  --->  "lang"
javascript: alert(document.forms[0].elements[1].name)  --->  "stazin"
javascript: alert(document.forms[0].elements[2].name)  --->  "stazout"
javascript: alert(document.forms[0].elements[3].name)  --->  "datag" 
javascript: alert(document.forms[0].elements[4].name)  --->  "datam"
javascript: alert(document.forms[0].elements[5].name)  --->  "dataa"
javascript: alert(document.forms[0].elements[6].name)  --->  "timsh"


IN IE6
javascript: alert(document.forms[0].elements[0].name)  --->  "lang"
javascript: alert(document.forms[0].elements[1].name)  --->  ""
javascript: alert(document.forms[0].elements[2].name)  --->  "stazin"
javascript: alert(document.forms[0].elements[3].name)  --->  "stazout" 
javascript: alert(document.forms[0].elements[4].name)  --->  "datag"
javascript: alert(document.forms[0].elements[5].name)  --->  "datam"
javascript: alert(document.forms[0].elements[6].name)  --->  "dataa"


So in IE, the values |giorno|, |mese|, etc. are assigned to the
correct fields, but in Mozilla, they are shifted and off by one index.
As Alessandro has suggested, this is bad programming practice: form
elements should be identified by their name or id, NOT by their order!

The mysterious |elements[1]| in IE6 is an <OBJECT> element
for a Shockwave Flash plugin. You can see this by using the
following javascript: URL after you load the site in IE6:

javascript: alert(document.forms[0].elements[1].outerHTML);

Comment 7

[Phil Schwartau]

Apparently the order of the form.elements array differs 
in IE and Mozilla, and the site authors coded this (badly)
to work in IE. Reassigning to DOM Level 0 to confirm this -
is it true that the order of the form.elements array differs
in IE and Mozilla, and there is no W3C contradiction?

I believe the answer is "Yes", so this bug should then
be reassigned to Tech Evangelism, Western Europe.
Also compare bug 127847 at http://www.trenitalia.it

Comment 8

[Boris Zbarsky [:bzbarsky]]

Phil, thanks.  This is a dup.  Follow-up comments and minimal testcase on the
other bug...

*** This bug has been marked as a duplicate of 127847 ***

Comment 9

[Phil Schwartau]

Verified Duplicate. Alessandro, thank you for this report; 
you have been cc'ed on the duplicate bug -