306356 - Display error when xhtml served as application/xhtml+xml has an invalid or no xmlns

Status: RESOLVED INVALID

(Core :: XML, enhancement)

Description

[Bryan Mills]

User-Agent:       Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; U; PPC Mac OS X Mach-O; en-US; rv:1.9a1) Gecko/20050815 Firefox/1.0+
Build Identifier: Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; U; PPC Mac OS X Mach-O; en-US; rv:1.9a1) Gecko/20050815 Firefox/1.0+

Deer Park a2 shows the provided URL (served as application/xhtml+xml as per
http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml-media-types/#application-xhtml-xml ) as an incorrect
(see Bug 306353) XML parse tree instead of properly-rendered XHTML.  The link
validates with the W3 validator AND displays correctly in Safari, although it's
technically not valid XHTML because it's missing the xmlns declaration.  Deer
Park seems to try to parse it as XHTML -- it just displays as XML.


Reproducible: Always

Steps to Reproduce:
Go to provided URL.

Actual Results:  
Incorrect XML parse tree

Expected Results:  
Error message explaining that/why the page is not valid XHTML, or "correct"
XHTML rendering (i.e. inserting a best-guess xmlns and continuing).

Comment 1

[Dave Townsend [:mossop]]

See point 3 fo strictly conforming documents
(http://www.w3.org/TR/2000/REC-xhtml1-20000126/#strict). XHTML documents must
have an xmlns declaration.

Comment 2

[Bryan Mills]

Attachment: offline copy of test-case

Comment 3

[Bryan Mills]

Yes, the xmlns is required -- but Mozilla should either tolerate the missing
xmlns (as does Safari -- which may be a compatibility issue) or produce an error
message (as it does with well-formedness errors).  Graceful failure modes, not
unhelpful errors...

Comment 4

[Bryan Mills]

If it's not a valid bug, then at least it's a valid feature request: CORRECT
error messages for invalid XHTML served as application/xhtml+xml for proper,
useful page debugging, OR permissive rendering of xhtml missing the required
xmlns field for compatibility with KHTML-based browsers.

Comment 5

[Dave Townsend [:mossop]]

Confirming feature request

Comment 6

[Boris Zbarsky [:bzbarsky]]

XHTML is just XML; the MIME type shouldn't affect how we parse it.  When parsed as XML, this document doesn't contain any XHTML elements.