533987 - Cross-Origin Resource Sharing: If pages is loaded from a file:// URI, Origin header is "null" (string)

Status: RESOLVED INVALID

(Core :: XML, defect)

Description

[Scott Parkerson]

User-Agent:       Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux x86_64; en-US) AppleWebKit/532.5 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/4.0.260.0 Safari/532.5
Build Identifier: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux x86_64; en-US; rv:1.9.1.5) Gecko/20091105 Foresight Linux/3.5 Firefox/3.5.5

If you load a webpage from a file:// URL (i.e. on the disk, not from a website) and try to submit an XmlHttpRequest that is cross-origin, the browser will (correctly) attempt to send a preflight OPTIONS request (or, if it's a simple cross-site request, the request itself).

The problem is that the value of the HTTP header "Origin" is set to the string "null" (not the null value, or perhaps "file://" as WebKit does).

Reproducible: Always

Steps to Reproduce:
1. Download the attached HTML file (test.html) and run it.
Actual Results:  
The value of the origin header is "null" (string).

Expected Results:  
Expected either a blank header or "file://". Not sure which it should be as the specification doesn't indicate.

For more information on Cross-Site Resource Sharing, see the W3C document.
http://www.w3.org/TR/cors/

Comment 1

[Scott Parkerson]

Attachment: Simple HTML test

Save this file and load it from a file:// URL (from disk) to reproduce the problem. It will contact PHP script (harmless) on my webserver (smerpology.org) to produce the results.

Comment 2

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

We are following the spec here. See

http://www.w3.org/TR/cors/#origin-request-header

Comment 3

[Scott Parkerson]

Ah, OK. I missed that part of the spec. However, there is still a problem.

If the server returns a "null" value for Access-Control-Allow-Origin for either a preflight OPTIONS call or a simple CORS response, Mozilla-based browsers will fail to treat that as acceptable. In the case of an OPTIONS request, the preflight check is treated as a failure and no follow-on request is made. In the case of a simple CORS request, "null" is ignored and the server's response is thrown away.

According to http://www.w3.org/TR/cors/#resource-sharing-check, this should still work (i.e. as long as the server returns a string that is a match for what was sent in Origin by the user agent, everything should be fine).

Should I open a new bug on that?

Comment 4

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

Hmm.. the spec used to say that that wasn't allowed IIRC. You had to use "*".

I would raise this with the webapps WG since I believe the spec is wrong here.

Comment 5

[Scott Parkerson]

Jonas,

I'll do a little research and get back to you.

The last working draft that specified this was here, in 2008:
http://www.w3.org/TR/2008/WD-access-control-20080214/#access2