253290 - display of anchor element DOM nodes displays the href attribute instead of the node description

Status: RESOLVED INVALID

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

Description

[Peter Asemann]

User-Agent:       Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Win98; en-US; rv:1.7) Gecko/20040616
Build Identifier: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Win98; en-US; rv:1.7) Gecko/20040616

I've made experiments with the DOM in order to re-arrange parts of websites.
I've tried walking through the DOM in a recursive way.
Displaying a node with alert(node) normally produces output like "object text"
or "objekt HTMLLiElement" or something.
Only if you display an anchor node this way, you get the href attributes value
instead. I find that's kind of strange and disturbing.

Reproducible: Always
Steps to Reproduce:
1. Load the testcase I'll attach with JS enabled and see.
Actual Results:  
The alert displays "[object text]" for the text nodes, "http://www.mozilla.org"
for the anchor element and "[object HTMLDivElement]" for the div element.

Expected Results:  
It should have displayed "[objekt HTMLAnchorElement]" for the anchor element.

Comment 1

[Peter Asemann]

Attachment: a very minimal testcase demonstrating the problem

the testcase promised

Comment 2

[Boris Zbarsky [:bzbarsky]]

Calling alert() on something just calls its toString() method and then alerts
the string.

Now anchor elements happen to have a nontrivial toString() method for DOM0 compat.

So everything is working as expected.

Comment 3

[Phil Ringnalda (:philor)]

*** Bug 361174 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***