503095 - XMLHttpRequest returns 0 (not 200) for local files, making local testing impractical.

Status: RESOLVED WONTFIX

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

Description

[Bryce Mozilla Nesbitt]

User-Agent:       Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i686; en-US; rv:1.8.1.19) Gecko/20081213 SUSE/1.1.14-1.1 SeaMonkey/1.1.14
Build Identifier: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i686; en-US; rv:1.8.1.19) Gecko/20081213 SUSE/1.1.14-1.1 SeaMonkey/1.1.14

Bug #424875 refers to a desire to use http:// urls from locally loaded scripts.
Bug #465397 refers to files one level up getting NS_ERROR_DOM_BAD_URI
This is different.

Place a script at file:///tmp/test.html.  Load a URL of "test.xml".  The file will load with a status of 0 rather that 200.  This breaks most scripts.  It can be coded around (by allowing "0" as a status code).  But that's a hack.

True on Seamonkey and Firefox at least on Linux.

Reproducible: Always

Steps to Reproduce:
See attached sample script.
Actual Results:  
The local filesystem should fake up a 200 or 404 error to better emulate what a server does.

Comment 1

[Bryce Mozilla Nesbitt]

Attachment: if (xmlhttp.status==200 || xmlhttp.status==0)

Comment 2

[Bryce Mozilla Nesbitt]

Attachment: Trivial xml test file to match test.html

Comment 3

[Bryce Mozilla Nesbitt]

Keywords: xmlhttp.status , xmlhttp.statusText, Seamonkey, Firefox, XMLHttpRequest, locally stored files, local filesystem, file://

Comment 4

[Boris Zbarsky [:bzbarsky]]

Note that the current XMLHttpRequest spec draft talks about raising an exception here.  See http://www.w3.org/TR/XMLHttpRequest/#status

See also bug 304980.

Fundamentally, though, we're doing the same thing as IE last I checked, are we not?  And since IE is basically what defines XMLHttpRequest behavior...

Comment 5

[Boris Zbarsky [:bzbarsky]]

I should also note that making local filesystem testing look just like the web page is an explicit non-goal for many reasons (including the security ones you cited).  If you want to test sites that use XHR locally, you really need to be running a local web server to get sane behavior in all sorts of ways, not just .status.

Comment 6

[Bryce Mozilla Nesbitt]

Failing to load the file at all (rather than, sort of, loading it) might be a good goal.

Comment 7

[Anne (:annevk)]

Making file URLs better is not something we should invest time in.