254153 - Form contents deleted / erased / reset after a Back, depending on <input> elements placement

Status: RESOLVED EXPIRED

(Core :: DOM: HTML Parser, defect)

Description

[Francois Bonzon]

User-Agent:       Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i686; en-US; rv:1.6) Gecko/20040413 Debian/1.6-5
Build Identifier: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i686; en-US; rv:1.6) Gecko/20040413 Debian/1.6-5

Depending on where you place the input elements of a form, after you submit it
and then push the back button, some field contents are lost.

This happens for example when you have your <form> and some <input> tags inside
a <table> but outside a <tr> or a <td>. I tried to create the smallest possible
HTML code that reproduces this bug, please see the URL above.

Reproducible: Always
Steps to Reproduce:
1. Go to the example URL that I have given above
2. Write anything in the two fields and hit the Send button
3. On the resulting page, then push the Back button

Actual Results:  
The contents of the second field is deleted (reset to blank). The first field is
intact however.

Expected Results:  
The contents of the second field should remain as it was before I submitted the
form.

Problem also occurs when one or both of the fields are type="hidden".

However, when the first input element is not present, this problem does not
occur. Also does not occur when all input elements are at the same nesting
level, e.g. all in <td>.

Comment 1

[Christian :Biesinger (don't email me, ping me on IRC)]

ok, your html is of course invalid, but that's fine, nobody writes valid html
anyway, people just put random text with < and > and characters inside on the
net, and hope browsers render something that remotely resembles what they expect.


the <input> inside the <table> gets moved before the <table> because it is not
allowed where you have put it. I'm not sure why the form stays where it is,
because it isn't allowed there either.

I'm especially not sure why the text does not get remembered, in the input
inside the <td>...

Comment 2

[Boris Zbarsky [:bzbarsky]]

> I'm not sure why the form stays where it is, because it isn't allowed there
> either.

Because if the form moves pages that wrap rows or cells in forms would break....

This is a duplicate.

Comment 3

[Dave Miller [:justdave]]

*** This bug has been marked as a duplicate of 246692 ***

Comment 4

[Boris Zbarsky [:bzbarsky]]

Reopening.  The bug this got marked a dup of may or may not be the same issue...
This is a duplicate of a different bug.

Comment 5

[Markus Gerstel]

*** Bug 254164 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***

Comment 6

[Daniel B.]

Note bug 288462.

Comment 7

[Christian Reis]

Could this be a dupe of bug 285730?

Comment 8

[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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Comment 9

[Gervase Markham [:gerv]]

This bug has been automatically resolved after a period of inactivity (see above
comment). If anyone thinks this is incorrect, they should feel free to reopen it.