196828 - </SELECT> 'select' end tag in a text area in a form is lower cased when the form is submitted.

Status: RESOLVED DUPLICATE of bug 64799

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

Description

[Michael MacAllister]

User-Agent:       Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; WinNT4.0; en-US; rv:1.2.1) Gecko/20021130
Build Identifier: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; WinNT4.0; en-US; rv:1.2.1) Gecko/20021130

We use XML tags in text area in HTML forms. Mozilla seems to give very special
attention to the SELECT endtag (this form of ours is used to store an XML based
SQL statement in a database). Whenever the form is submitted, Mozilla seems to
lower case the </SELECT> end tag causing our system not ot recognize it as the
end tag for an open start tag (our application is case sensitive).

Reproducible: Always

Steps to Reproduce:
1. enter the string "</SELECT>" in a text area in any form
2. submit the form
3. reload the form and check the text area

Actual Results:  
The "</SELECT>" was converted to "</select>"
The SQL statement created by our application based on this text area is broken.

Expected Results:  
Mozilla should not be altering the content of text areas under any circumstances.

I am using a standard Mozilla installation with default theme. We cannot use
Mozilla to edit these forms and would have to remove Mozilla from the supported
browser list which we don't want to do.

Comment 1

[Olivier Cahagne]

can you try again with latest 1.3 build ?
http://www.mozillazine.org/weblogs/asa/archives/002632.html

Comment 2

[Michael MacAllister]

Same behaviour in 1.3.1 beta. This does not occur in Netscape 4.7 or IE6.0.

Comment 3

[Alfonso Martinez]

You should provide a testcase showing the problem, as it can be in your own
report Mozilla doesn't seems to have any special behaviour for the "</SELECT>"
sentence, I can see it three times in upper case in your report, so it seems to
work correctly.

Comment 4

[Tim Powell]

Attachment: testcase showing tags getting lowercased in textarea

It appears that this affects HTML tags in general. I thought that you were
supposed to escape HTML entities in textareas and indeed using </TAG>
works as expected.

Comment 5

[Tim Powell]

Oh, I almost forgot, I confirm this bug on Mozilla 20030310 (1.3 release
candidate) on Win2k. This has nothing to do with form submission, but with
interpreting the form elements.

Ooh... I just checked the source for the testcase. It is incorrectly showing the
first two tags as lowercase even though they are in fact uppercase in the page.
Save it to verify. Also document.forms[0].elements[0].value shows that the DOM
thinks they are lowercase as well.

Comment 6

[Tim Powell]

This also occurs with Phoenix 20021228, so it's been happening for a while.

Comment 7

[Tim Powell]

This is a dupe of an old bug. In bug 64799 comment #6 hixie says "I was just
pointing out that having raw '<' and '>' (and '&') characters in <textarea>
elements is invalid per HTML."

*** This bug has been marked as a duplicate of 64799 ***

Comment 8

[Michael MacAllister]

Unfortunately, we cannot use character entities and since IE does not lower case
HTML tags in text areas we will just have to go with that as recommended browser.
Thanks for your help.

Comment 9

[Michael MacAllister]

Technically, these markup characters are invalid not just in textarea
but anywhere where CDATA is required. Note that this also applies to
javascript elements. Yet here browsers don't like to find < instead
of '<'!