I think the most shocking thing is when you follow it through to the MSDN bug discussion—and you find people blaming the author for writing invalid HTML. Apparently IE doesn’t need to follow the robustness principle. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robustness_principle
This page crashes Internet Explorer, even version 9 and 10.
11–20 of 94 posts
Re: This page crashes Internet Explorer, even version 9 and 10.
#12Is this a big deal? It's amusing that it is such a simple chunk of HTML, but I was under the impression that it's not terribly difficult to DoS the average browser. I accidentally discovered some very simple HTML that reliably crashes Outlook whenever you try to view or preview the message a while back. I reported it and I think they eventually fixed it.
> I reported it and I think they eventually fixed it.
If you follow through to the MSDN discussion, it is from 2009. So "eventually fixed it" could apply in this case, only because the timescale is unbounded, but waiting years for a fix seems unreasonable.Re: This page crashes Internet Explorer, even version 9 and 10.
#13What was the problem? was it the unclosed tag?
Edit with more info: Looks like removing any of the markup prevents the crash. "Removing the CSS, the div, the table, etc all cause this code to not crash IE"
Re: This page crashes Internet Explorer, even version 9 and 10.
#14What was the problem? was it the unclosed tag?
Re: This page crashes Internet Explorer, even version 9 and 10.
#15Is this a big deal? It's amusing that it is such a simple chunk of HTML, but I was under the impression that it's not terribly difficult to DoS the average browser. I accidentally discovered some very simple HTML that reliably crashes Outlook whenever you try to view or preview the message a while back. I reported it and I think they eventually fixed it.
> I reported it and I think they eventually fixed it. If you follow through to the MSDN discussion, it is from 2009. So "eventually fixed it" could apply in this case, only because the timescale is unbounded, but waiting years for a fix seems unreasonable.
Re: This page crashes Internet Explorer, even version 9 and 10.
#16Seems like we're just trying to pick on IE here.
Re: This page crashes Internet Explorer, even version 9 and 10.
#17I think the most shocking thing is when you follow it through to the MSDN bug discussion—and you find people blaming the author for writing invalid HTML. Apparently IE doesn’t need to follow the robustness principle. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robustness_principle
In fact, you can make quite a case that "robustness" as defined that way is responsible for the horrible mess that HTML and cross-browser compatibility is these days. For instance, if you improperly close tags, or overlap tags, IE (and others I assume) will dutifully go about trying to figure out what you meant: being very "robust" in their interpretation of input outside the spec.
By implementing behaviour outside the spec (being "robust"), you are implicitly extending the spec, and every other browser has to implement unspecified behaviour in the same way.
Re: This page crashes Internet Explorer, even version 9 and 10.
#18Re: This page crashes Internet Explorer, even version 9 and 10.
#19What was the problem? was it the unclosed tag?
Re: This page crashes Internet Explorer, even version 9 and 10.
#20I think the most shocking thing is when you follow it through to the MSDN bug discussion—and you find people blaming the author for writing invalid HTML. Apparently IE doesn’t need to follow the robustness principle. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robustness_principle
I agree, it's unbelievable. End users don't care about incorrect markup, they care about their browser hanging.