392566 - XHTML anchors with closing tags in the wrong place

Status: RESOLVED INVALID

(Core :: DOM: Core & HTML, defect)

Description

[Tomer Cohen :tomer]

Attachment: XHTML anchors with closing tags in the wrong place

I got noticed that anchors in XHTML do not behave as it should. If we specify anchors without any text, Gecko (including 1.9) won't trust the element closing tag, and this make the anchor live forever. 

I.e., "<a name="foo" id="foo" />bar" should not be rendered as "<a>bar</a>".

I'm attaching a testcase for your pleasure. 

The testcase validate well in W3C XHTML, but tidy like it to be <a></a>, so maybe I'm wrong and Gecko should never behave like I want it to.

Comment 1

[Tomer Cohen :tomer]

Strange. As Alex Vincent changed the mime type to application/xhtml+xml the testcase returns the expected result. Gecko do not trust the xhtml-strict doctype?

Comment 2

[Alex Vincent [:WeirdAl]]

No.  It trusts whatever the server sent the document as.  You filed it as text/html, and that means tag soup.

http://72.14.253.104/search?q=cache:ioeUkb_PLJEJ:www.hixie.ch/advocacy/xhtml+XHTML+as+text/html&hl=en&ct=clnk&cd=3&gl=us&client=firefox-a

Comment 3

[Lior Kaplan]

1. This problem only happens with anchors, but not with other XHTML tags like <p /> , <meta /> and <br />. I would expect Gecko to be consistent in its behavior.

2. So, on the practical side, this means (a) I need to change my web server default MIME type or (b) to supply files with different file extension and thus different MIME type.

Personally I don't think both a good answers for the XHTML standard.

3. According to this bug, I can conclude that Gecko ignores the this file's DOCTYPE, which, as I see it, is problematic as we try to keep our pages w3c valid.

Thanks.