XHTML with self-closing <title/> element does not display (XML parsing algorithm, UIWebView only)

[rkwright]

(Transferred from Bugzilla, bug #51, 24 July 2014)
Daniel Weck 2014-03-06 16:41:46 CST

Basically, with embedded WebKit (UIWebView), any self-closing element that should normally contain text is considered open by the underlying XML parser. In the case of <title/>, this results in the entire DOM (body included) to be "merged" into the title element...and as a result the viewport remains empty in LauncherOSX (inspect HTML to see that the body is empty, all the content is shifted into head->title).

In summary: XHTML documents that do not strictly adhere to some XML formatting conventions can be very problematic in UIWebView-dependent renderers (I personally only tested Launcher-OSX).

Another example of similar problem is document.createElement() vs. document.createElementNS() ===> only the latter explicit namespace allows the creation of HTMLElement nodes (instead of Element, which breaks CSS selectors), Once again, this issue does not affect "real" web browsers, only UIWebView.

Not sure if there is a configuration flag in UIWebView that would relax the XML parser?

[rkwright]

This bug needs to be retested to see if still reproducible.

[rkwright]

The link to the bug-file was lost. Will need to recreate the bug-file in order to test.

[danielweck]

In OSX Yosemite, I am unable to reproduce the document.createElement() vs. document.createElementNS() behaviour (which used to break CSS selectors). I am also unable to reproduce the

<title />

self-closing tag problem.
In other words, WebView has been fixed since I identified this issue. Perhaps this is fixed in OSX Mavericks as well.
At any rate, closing.