Bug 7139

Summary:

Drop support for <isindex>

Product:

WebKit

Reporter:

Ian 'Hixie' Hickson <ian>

Component:

DOM

Assignee:

Chris Dumez <cdumez>

Status:

RESOLVED FIXED

Severity:

Normal

CC:

ap, bugs-webkit, cdumez, commit-queue, darin, ddkilzer, d, eoconnor, gavin.sharp, hyatt, ian, kennyluck, koivisto, nickshanks, rniwa, sam, webkit, webkit, zcorpan

Priority:

Version:

420+

Hardware:

OS:

Linux

Attachments:

Description	Flags
Patch	none

Ian 'Hixie' Hickson

Reported 2006-02-07 22:20:00 PST

According to my study of one billion Web pages, less than 0.0013% of pages use the <isindex> element. In fact, so few pages use it that it didn't appear on my top 1000 most-used elements list, meaning it was used less than <side_ads>, <preform>, <titolo>, <bdbereich>, <org>, <cunet>, <l1>, <hot:trolley>, and numerous other bogus elements. <isindex> has been a pain (see e.g. bug 4574 or bug 4828), and Safari's support for it differs from Mozilla's, IE's, and Opera's. I would like to drop support for parsing <isindex> specially in HTML5. If it turns out that <isindex> _is_ in fact used, then we'll find out about it soon and can change the HTML5 spec so that it is clear how it should be implemented.

Attachments
Patch (283.81 KB, patch) 2016-09-12 21:03 PDT, Chris Dumez	no flags	Details Formatted Diff Diff
View All Add attachment proposed patch, testcase, etc.

Ian 'Hixie' Hickson

Comment 1 2006-02-07 22:21:16 PST

(m326369, o195531)

Anne van Kesteren

Comment 2 2008-01-28 16:08:12 PST

HTML5 was changed by the way to support <isindex> in the parser.

Robert Blaut

Comment 3 2008-02-11 03:30:15 PST

(In reply to comment #2) > HTML5 was changed by the way to support <isindex> in the parser. > So shouldn't the bug to be resolved as WONTFIX?

David Kilzer (:ddkilzer)

Comment 4 2008-02-23 13:45:22 PST

(In reply to comment #3) > (In reply to comment #2) > > HTML5 was changed by the way to support <isindex> in the parser. > So shouldn't the bug to be resolved as WONTFIX? Yes.

David Kilzer (:ddkilzer)

Comment 5 2008-04-10 13:25:29 PDT

(In reply to comment #0) > <isindex> has been a pain (see e.g. bug 4574 or bug 4828), and Safari's support > for it differs from Mozilla's, IE's, and Opera's. And Bug 18415.

Theresa O'Connor

Comment 6 2015-04-22 12:28:19 PDT

Since we last looked at this, Chrome and IE have both said they will drop support for this tag. Blink thread: https://groups.google.com/a/chromium.org/forum/#!topic/blink-dev/14q_I06gwg8 I can't find a citation for isindex being dropped in Project Spartan, but Travis from MSFT confirmed this in a conversation.

Domenic Denicola

Comment 7 2016-04-21 11:05:05 PDT

Right now we're at 2 vs. 2 rendering engines with regard to isindex support. Is WebKit interested in following along and removing it? https://github.com/whatwg/html/issues/1088

Simon Pieters (:zcorpan)

Comment 8 2016-09-12 05:50:46 PDT

It has been removed from the spec. Tests added to web-platform-tests in https://github.com/w3c/web-platform-tests/pull/3684 and html5lib-tests in https://github.com/html5lib/html5lib-tests/pull/74

Chris Dumez

Comment 9 2016-09-12 19:01:38 PDT

Given that this was dropped from the HTML spec, Chrome and Edge, I think we should at least try to drop <isindex>.

Chris Dumez

Comment 10 2016-09-12 21:03:09 PDT

Created attachment 288667 [details] Patch

Chris Dumez

Comment 11 2016-09-12 21:05:37 PDT

Corresponding Mozilla bug: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1266495