414612 - getElementsByTagName returns no results for namespace type tag names

Status: RESOLVED DUPLICATE of bug 31671

(Firefox :: General, defect)

Description

[Allistair]

User-Agent:       Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-GB; rv:1.8.1.11) Gecko/20071127 Firefox/2.0.0.11
Build Identifier: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-GB; rv:1.8.1.11) Gecko/20071127 Firefox/2.0.0.11

Given an XML tag <abc:TheTag>xxx</abc:TheTag>

FF3 correctly returns a collection of these when I call:

xmlDoc.getElementsByTagName("abc:TheTag");

However, FF2 actually requires that the abc: namespace is removed else it returns an empty collection.

So only the following works in FF2..

xmlDoc.getElementsByTagName(name.substring(name.indexOf(":") + 1));

IE and Opera are happy with 

xmlDoc.getElementsByTagName("abc:TheTag");

but there is a definate change betweeen FF2 and FF3 that will cause grief for applications relying on this function with this sort of tag naming.



Reproducible: Always

Steps to Reproduce:
1. create an xml doc var with

var parser = new DOMParser();
var xmlDoc = parser.parseFromString(xml, "text/xml");

where xml contains xml with tags named abc:TheTag

2. Call xmlDoc.getElementsByTagName("abc:TheTag"); in FF2 and FF3
3. FF2 will return nothing, FF3 will return the collection
4. Call xmlDoc.getElementsByTagName("TheTag"); in FF2 and FF3
5. FF2 will return the collection, FF3 will not


Expected Results:  
a collection of abc:TheTag

Comment 1

[Gérard Talbot]

Shouldn't it be instead:
getElementsByTagNameNS
http://www.w3.org/TR/2000/REC-DOM-Level-2-Core-20001113/core.html#ID-A6C90942

getElementsByTagNameNS
http://www.w3.org/TR/2004/REC-DOM-Level-3-Core-20040407/core.html#ID-getElBTNNS

Comment 2

[Allistair]

i tried

return xmlDoc.getElementsByTagNameNS("qas", "PicklistEntry");

but this fails on all browsers including FF2 and FF3.

so fails 


return xmlDoc.getElementsByTagNameNS("qas:PicklistEntry");

so only getElementsByTagName works, just not in FF3 without stripping the qas: prefix.

Comment 3

[Ben Hollis]

Attachment: Demo of the change in behavior

This shows the difference in behavior. It also includes a demo of getElementsByTagNameNS, which works consistently between the two versions.

Comment 4

[Jonas Sicking (:sicking) No longer reading bugmail consistently]

This seems to behave as specified.

xmlDoc.getElementsByTagName("abc:TheTag")
should return a list with 1 element.

xmlDoc.getElementsByTagName("TheTag")
should return a list with 0 element.


getElementsByTagName returns all elements whose .tagName matches the passed in string.