356996 - Microsummary linked from XSLT'ed XML files is not updated

Status: RESOLVED WONTFIX

(Firefox Graveyard :: Microsummaries, defect)

Description

[lxander.m]

User-Agent:       Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US; rv:1.8.1) Gecko/20061010 Firefox/2.0
Build Identifier: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US; rv:1.8.1) Gecko/20061010 Firefox/2.0

Microsummaries in HTML rendered from XML files with linked XSL stylesheet do not get updated unless the user first views the XML page. Furthermore, attempting to "Reload Live Title" after restarting the browser results in an empty bookmark title.

Reproducible: Always

Steps to Reproduce:
1. Download three sample files and place in same directory.
2. Open sample.xml.
3. Bookmark file with Live Title.
4. Restart browser and select "Reload Live Title" from previously created bookmark.
5. Observe now empty bookmark title.
6. Click on bookmark to view file.
7. Again select "Reload Live Title" and observe correct live title.

Actual Results:  
Before first viewing page, bookmark title is empty.

Expected Results:  
Bookmark title is automatically updated.

Comment 1

[lxander.m]

Attachment: Sample XML Content (1 of 3)

Comment 2

[lxander.m]

Attachment: XML Style File (2 of 3)

Comment 3

[lxander.m]

Attachment: Microsummary File (3 of 3)

Comment 4

[Myk Melez [:myk] [@mykmelez]]

The reason this is happening is that the microsummary service generally updates a generated live title by downloading the page via XMLHttpRequest.  And when XMLHttpRequest retrieves a resource, it ignores XSLT stylesheets embedded in the page's source.

The reason things work after the user views the XML page is that the microsummary service uses the existing document object for a page, instead of redownloading the page via XMLHttpRequest, when it updates the live title for a page that is currently loaded into a browser tab.  And that existing document object has already had its embedded XSLT stylesheets processed.

Ironically, bug 364525 reports the opposite problem and asks for the microsummary service to always process generators against the original content rather than the content created by the XSLT stylesheet.

But, per bug 364525 comment 1, I'm inclined to say that the behavior requested by this bug is the more correct behavior, since generators are more likely to be developed against the post-processed content than the pre-processed content.

In order to fix this bug, we'll need a way to instruct XMLHttpRequest to apply XSLT stylesheets embedded in the resources it retrieves instead of ignoring them, which is bug 366756, so making this bug depend on that one.

Comment 5

[Marco Bonardo [:mak]]

- BUGSPAM -
Wontfixing all Microsummaries bugs, since the feature has been removed from the core product and previous versions won't get further fixes for it.
If interested in supporting Microsummaries in your add-on, you're free to use our old microsummaries code and to search all previously open bugs by looking for [microsummaries-feature-removal] in the status whiteboard field.