Bug 7139 – Drop support for <isindex>

• Component: DOM
• Status: RESOLVED FIXED

[Ian 'Hixie' Hickson]

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.

[Ian 'Hixie' Hickson]

(m326369, o195531)

[Anne van Kesteren]

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

[Robert Blaut]

(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)]

(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)]

(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]

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]

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)]

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]

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

[Chris Dumez]

Created attachment 288667 [details]
Patch

[Chris Dumez]

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

[WebKit Commit Bot]

Comment on attachment 288667 [details]
Patch

Clearing flags on attachment: 288667

Committed r205858: <http://trac.webkit.org/changeset/205858>

[WebKit Commit Bot]

All reviewed patches have been landed.  Closing bug.