Bug 74500 – <img src="#"> requests main document resource unnecessarily

• Status: NEW
• Component: Page Loading

[Vsevolod Vlasov]

Looks like the fragment case was missed in https://bugs.webkit.org/show_bug.cgi?id=69211.
Originally found in https://code.google.com/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=105535.

[Alexey Proskuryakov]

Empty URL is a special case in HTML5. We'll need new research for src="#", and a change in the spec if it's warranted. See <http://lists.whatwg.org/htdig.cgi/whatwg-whatwg.org/2009-December/024357.html> for a discussion that resulted in changing the spec for empty URLs.

What do other browsers do?

[Vsevolod Vlasov]

I used following test cases:

1. <img src=""></img>
2. <img src="#"></img>
3. <img src="#test"></img>

Opera 11 makes only one request (main document) in each case, so they are ignoring fragment and consider "#" an empty url.

Firefox 3.6 makes one request in the first case and two in other cases.

Firefox 8 makes two requests in each case (so they are making two requests for src="" again!)

Chromium/Safari with ToT webkit make one request in the first case and two in other cases as we would expect.

[Alexey Proskuryakov]

> Firefox 8 makes two requests in each case (so they are making two requests for src="" again!)

Please file a bugzilla.mozilla.org bug for them to fix.

> Chromium/Safari with ToT webkit make one request in the first case and two in other cases as we would expect.

Getting a spec change first is probably the best way to go about this. Would you be willing to e-mail WHATWG?

[Ian 'Hixie' Hickson]

How common is this? Unless it's really common (why would it be?) I'd suggest not doing anything special for the latter two cases. (src="" is common because it's the default value.)