214448 - infinite loop of redirects

Status: RESOLVED INVALID

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

Description

[Chris Howard]

User-Agent:       Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 6.0; Windows NT 5.0)
Build Identifier: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.0; en-US; rv:1.4) Gecko/20030624    AND  Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.0; en-US; rv:1.5a) Gecko/20030728 Mozilla Firebird/0.6.1

window.location.href="";

Causes the page to reload instead of taking the browser to 
http://servername/foldername/  (with no filename).   Quite often this type of 
quick redirection to the index of a site is used when the index page is changed 
often between index.htm, index.php, index.cgi and so on...

Reproducible: Always

Steps to Reproduce:
1. Use the following code (for cross browser compatability:
		function redirect() { window.location.href=""; }
		function timer() { setTimeout("redirect()", 0); }
		timer();
2. load page.
3.

Actual Results:  
infinite loop of page reloads

Expected Results:  
redirect user to http://servername/foldername/

Comment 1

[Phil Schwartau]

---> DOM Level 0 for further comments and triage

Comment 2

[Boris Zbarsky [:bzbarsky]]

This has come up in the past; the question is what an empty URI resolves to
given the base URI of the current page.  I believe the correct answer is in fact
"uri of current page".

Comment 3

[Mats Palmgren (inactive)]

AFAICT, Boris is correct.  See point 2. in:
http://www.zvon.org/tmRFC/RFC2396/Output/chapter5.html#sub2

Comment 4

[Darin Fisher]

right, i think this bug is invalid per the spec.  however, it might be
interesting to know how IE and other browsers behave.

Comment 5

[Andreas Otte]

Boris is right, see also in RFC 2396:

13.2.C.2. Abnormal Examples

Although the following abnormal examples are unlikely to occur in normal
practice, all URI parsers should be capable of resolving them consistently. Each
example uses the same base as above.

An empty reference refers to the start of the current document.

<> = (current document)



But this has been handled differently in the past. Note the "current document"
not the "base uri". Older RFCs referred to the base uri instead AFAIK. So you
can expect some websites coded with a different result in mind based on older RFCs.

Comment 6

[Stewart Gordon]

Is the destination of an empty href defined by specs anywhere?

The normal way of linking back home is href="./".

Comment 7

[Gervase Markham [:gerv]]

This is an automated message, with ID "auto-resolve01".

This bug has had no comments for a long time. Statistically, we have found that
bug reports that have not been confirmed by a second user after three months are
highly unlikely to be the source of a fix to the code.

While your input is very important to us, our resources are limited and so we
are asking for your help in focussing our efforts. If you can still reproduce
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If it is not a problem any longer, you need take no action. If this bug is not
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Thank you for your help in this matter.

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Seamonkey:   http://www.mozilla.org/projects/seamonkey/

Comment 8

[Stewart Gordon]

Seems to be doing the same here (2005101209 Mac).  But where, oh where is the
relevant bit of the DOM spec?

Comment 9

[Frankie]

comment 5 is correct; an empty URI means the current document, not the current directory.