[webkit-dev] getting contents of noscript element through DOM

[Darin Adler]

On Oct 12, 2009, at 9:30 AM, mab2001 wrote:

> It seems that with WebKit, the contents of the noscript tag cannot  
> be accessed through the DOM. FF and IE (haven't tested other  
> browsers) allow access through the textContent property but in  
> Safari and Chrome this just comes back blank.

I think this is simply a mistake, not something intentional in a  
thoughtful way.

It’s the HTML parser that’s doing the discarding of the content here.  
Changing the parser to instead create a text node seems relatively  
straightforward, although not trivial.

> I've tried looking through the WebKit code to see why this is  
> happening but admit to being a little lost.

The code in question is in the file HTMLParser.cpp. The content is  
skipped by calls to the function setSkipMode. The code that actually  
causes the content to be discarded is the code that calls the skipMode 
() function in HTMLParser.cpp and HTMLTokenizer.cpp. There are six  
different call sites.

If we change <noscript>, we probably want to do the same thing for  
<noembed> and <noframes>.

One of the most important aspects of fixing this bug would be to  
create some good test cases. Even someone who will not fix the bug  
could create the bug in bugs.webkit.org and make test cases, try the  
test cases out in other browsers and make sure they pass. That person  
could even make the test cases in the proper form for the LayoutTests  
directory and submit a patch with the test case and the current  
expected failures as a way to get the ball rolling.

     -- Darin