On Fri, 29 Jun 2007 22:34:46 +0200, Geoffrey Garen <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
wrote:
The XMLHttpRequest spec says that, if an HTTP response contains a
content-type header that is not XML, XMLHttpRequest .responseXML should
return NULL
(http://www.w3.org/TR/XMLHttpRequest/#xml-response-entity-body).
I'm looking into this issue because it has broken a widget on Mac OS X.
The widget uses XMLHttpRequest to load a valid XML file and then read
responseXML. Unfortunately, the file comes to use with an incorrect MIME
type (application/octet-stream), so we return NULL and later throw an
exception.
To me, it seems preferable to try to parse the response as XML,
returning NULL only if parsing fails. The spec already says you should
do this if the content-type header is missing. Why not do it always?
To allow extensions in the future. For instance, we might want to populate
responseXML with HTML if the MIME type is text/html. However, I understand
this is about file requests, which are not addressed by the specification.
I suppose I should try to cover them in version 2.
--
Anne van Kesteren
<http://annevankesteren.nl/>
<http://www.opera.com/>
