272663 - Programatically enabled form text field is does not return to disabled status when returning to page via back button

Status: RESOLVED INVALID

(SeaMonkey :: General, defect)

Description

[James Holder]

User-Agent:       Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.0; en-US; rv:1.7.5) Gecko/20041107 Firefox/1.0
Build Identifier: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.0; en-US; rv:1.7.3) Gecko/20040910

Starting with a text form field that is disabled in the HTML <span
style="color:#0000ff">&lt;input type="text" name="field" disabled&gt;</span>.
Then using some method to programatically enable the form field, enter some text
and submit the form. Once the next page has loaded, hit the back button. The
other elements of the page return to their pristine state, however, the form
field remains enabled, with the user entered value remaining visible.

Reproducible: Always
Steps to Reproduce:
   1.  Load page (<A
href="http://www.thedigitalpimp.org/moz_bug/">http://www.thedigitalpimp.org/moz_bug/</a>).
   2. Click the "Enable" button.
   3. When the text field is enabled, enter some text into the field (i.e.
"Hello world.".
   4. Hit submit.
   5. Once the action page loads, click the back button to return to this form.
   6. Notice that the "Enable" button has returned to it's normal state, but
that the text field is still enabled, even though the disable command has been
hard coded into the field parameters..


Actual Results:  
The text field was still enabled, and editable

Expected Results:  
The field should have been disabled, since that was the original state of the
field according to the HMTL parameters

 My issue is not with keeping a value in the form fields, but that the form
field is not reverting to its normal disabled state when the page is reloaded.
Even when manually refreshed, the field never returns to disabled, until you
actually force the browser to retrieve the page from the server
again(SHIFT-refresh). I haven't been able to find any RFC's or documentation
that specifally outlined this type of situation, so I am assuming that this is a
bug rather than behavior by design.

I have looked at other form types, in particular select boxes, and they, upon
returning to the page are disabled as expected. My personal preference is to
have the HTML settings overide all of the programatic settings, and leave the
autopopulation values up to the browser/user.

Comment 1

[Boris Zbarsky [:bzbarsky]]

Actually, this is by design.  The form control value and disabled state are
explictly restored from session history on history navigation.

The fact that the disabled state is not restored for textarea and select is a
bug.  I've filed that as bug 277724.