313854 - [XMLHttpRequest] responseXML contains error document for invalid XML files

Status: RESOLVED DUPLICATE of bug 289714

(Core :: XML, defect)

Description

[Hish]

User-Agent:       Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.0; en-US; rv:1.8b4) Gecko/20050910 SeaMonkey/1.0a
Build Identifier: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.0; en-US; rv:1.8b4) Gecko/20050910 SeaMonkey/1.0a

XMLHttpRequest fails to load an invalid XML file >6kb. 
This happens when the server sends contentType=text/xml and the file is not valid XML.
All version before Gecko 1.8 work fine here and return responseXML=null and responseText with the contents.
One could argue that this is not a bug but a feature because the server sends the wrong header. But the problem is that sometimes we have no control about foreign servers.

Reproducible: Always

Steps to Reproduce:

Comment 1

[Sébastien Auger]

If it's just failing without hanging the browser or crashing etc .. we should not be worried. Does it affect something else for you or this is not big deal ?

Comment 2

[Hish]

Why we shouldn't be worried?
a) That's a regression and 
b) we have no chance to load a document once the server sends text/xml by mistake

Comment 3

[Sébastien Auger]

(In reply to comment #2)
> Why we shouldn't be worried?
> a) That's a regression and 
> b) we have no chance to load a document once the server sends text/xml by
> mistake
> 

oh I see now, didn't understood very well your bug description.
but the build you're using is more than a month old, did you verified with newer builds?

Comment 4

[Nickolay_Ponomarev]

Could you attach / point to a testcase please? I couldn't reproduce the bug easily.

Comment 5

[Dão Gottwald [:dao]]

This is true for both 1.8 branch and trunk.

Comment 6

[Dão Gottwald [:dao]]

Attachment: sample responseXML

This is alert(r.responseXML.documentElement.textContent). r.responseXML should have been null.

Comment 7

[Dão Gottwald [:dao]]

Btw, responseText does not contain the error document but the real response.

Comment 8

[Hallvord R. M. Steen [:hallvors]]

Gecko has this old feature where XML parser outputs a document with error info if parsing fails. This is wrong per spec and other implementations

Test cases:
http://w3c-test.org/web-platform-tests/master/XMLHttpRequest/responsexml-media-type.htm
http://w3c-test.org/web-platform-tests/master/XMLHttpRequest/responsexml-non-well-formed.htm

Comment 9

[Thomas Wisniewski]

This bug seems like a dupe of bug 289714, which was just fixed. The web platform tests in comment 8 are now passing, and XHRs made by web content for invalid XML documents will now give a null responseXML instead of a <parsererror> document (and the parsing failure will be logged to the web console).