454655 - DOM Source Of Selection replaces '&' with '&'

Status: RESOLVED WONTFIX

(Core :: DOM: Serializers, defect)

Description

[Andreas Moog]

User-Agent:       Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i686; en-US; rv:1.9.0.2) Gecko/2008090211 Ubuntu/8.10 (intrepid) Firefox/3.0.1
Build Identifier: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i686; en-US; rv:1.9.0.2) Gecko/2008090211 Ubuntu/8.10 (intrepid) Firefox/3.0.1

When viewing a part of the source code of a web page, i.e. Source of Selection, every '&' character (wheter in an url or otherwise) is replaced with it's html entity code, '&'. 



Reproducible: Always

Steps to Reproduce:
1. See attached html-file.
2. Select the link
3. Right Click and choose source of selection
Actual Results:  
<a href="http://example.com?param=1&amp;etc">Link text with &amp; char</a>

Expected Results:  
<a href="http://example.com?param=1&etc">Link text with & char</a>


This bug was reported on Launchpad:
https://bugs.edge.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/firefox-3.0/+bug/255524

Comment 1

[Jesse Ruderman]

View Selection Source serializes the DOM; it is not required to show a precise substring of the original source.

The DOM contains a '&' character, and the correct way to serialize that inside an href attribute is to convert it to "&".  It would be wasteful and difficult to "remember" that the original HTML was invalid and emit invalid HTML during serialization.