Bug 8051 – Empty forms are submitted incorrectly

• Component: Forms
• Status: RESOLVED FIXED

[Alexey Proskuryakov]

Pressing the button at <http://vesna.yandex.ru/cgi-bin/vesna> should each time result in new random text being displayed. This doesn't work if one is behind a caching proxy, because the server sends no proxy control HTTP headers, and the URL is always the same in Safari.

Firefox and WinIE correctly append a question mark to the URL when submitting the form, which avoids caching: <http://vesna.yandex.ru/cgi-bin/vesna?>.

<form name="filo" method="get" action="/cgi-bin/vesna">
<input type="submit" value="Continue"/>
</form>

[Alexey Proskuryakov]

Created attachment 7393 [details]
proposed fix

[Erik Arvidsson]

Firefox 3.5.3 does not add the ? when the form has no form data.

https://dl.getdropbox.com/u/182043/tests/form-action-anchor2.html

Maybe they changed since this bug is pretty old.

The reason why I am bring this up again is that this is one of the reasons for bug 20342. That test submits to a fragment (#a) with an empty form but since a '?' is added the URL is not the same and therefore reloads from the server making which causes the test to infinitely reload. (There are more problems with that layout test.)

[Victor Costan]

IE9 does the same thing as Firefox.  However, the WebKit behavior follows standards. I will add a longer comment explaining my interpretation of the standards to a bug that basically asks to get this change reverted.

https://bugs.webkit.org/show_bug.cgi?id=30103