Interesting report concerning META elements

[David Mark]

Couldn't think of a better subject as this one is a bit of a mystery.

Had a report from Sweden that there was a problem with this test page
in Opera 9.62:-

http://www.cinsoft.net/attributes.html

The problematic code was in one of the baseline DOM property tests:-

el = doc.getElementsByTagName('meta')[2];
assertEquals(el.httpEquiv, 'Cache-Control', "HTTP equivalent");

In short, el was null. Now, of course, there is indeed a third META:-

<meta http-equiv="Cache-Control" content="no-cache">

....put there strictly for the purpose of testing. And it got through
the attribute tests fine, which use the second META:-

<meta http-equiv="Content-Language" content="en-us">

Clearly, in production code, any such logic would have to test that el
is not "falsey" before proceeding. The only cause for a failure here
that I can think of is if that META was stripped by a proxy of some
sort. Unsurprisingly, I was unable to reproduce the problem (even
with that exact version of Opera).

I added a guard against this just so the person reporting the issue
could try again to get all the way through the tests. ISTM that I
should do that for SCRIPT elements, which are known to be removed by
proxies, but META's?

 

[David Mark]

I added a guard against this just so the person reporting the issue
could try again to get all the way through the tests.  ISTM that I
should do that for SCRIPT elements, which are known to be removed by
proxies, but META's?

Thinking about that again, there is already a check that would short-
circuit the tests if the one SCRIPT element were missing (it's the one
with the attr and prop functions after all).

 

[David Mark]

Clearly, in production code, any such logic would have to test that el
is not "falsey" before proceeding.  The only cause for a failure here
that I can think of is if that META was stripped by a proxy of some
sort.

That was it. Firewall (or whatever) stripped the cache-control META.
Probably not the best choice for a test META.