Musings

Javascript Bug

Well, I faced an interesting choice.

My Comment Popup used to have a functioning “rememberMe” javascript. But it did not render MathML (since the Content-Type was set to “text/html”).

I changed this to “application/xhtml+xml” when served to Mozilla. Alarmingly, doing so somehow breaks the aforementioned javascript.

If any of the experts have a fix, I’d love to hear it. I suspect, though, that this may be a Mozilla bug.

Update: It’s not a “bug, it’s a “feature”. When served as a text/html, the document is governed by the DOM for HTMLDocument. Firing up Mozilla’s DOM Inspector, (I’ve never done that before!) we see that, indeed, HTMLDocument has a cookie attribute. And we can refer to document.cookie in a Javascript to get at it.

When served as a application/xhtml+xml, Mozilla says the document is governed by the DOM for XMLDocument. And, firing up the old DOM Inspector again, we discover that … whoops! … there is no cookie attribute for XMLDocument, and not a hint of how to access the document’s associated cookies.

This surely cannot be what the W3C had in mind when they said XHTML 1.1 documents should be served as application/xhtml+xml.

Does anyone understand this stuff? I don’t; I am only dimly mouthing words I found on the internet. But if the above description is correct, the situation is utterly, criminally brain-dead. Whadya mean one can’t have cookies in XHTML?