Firefox 3.5 XHTML support stinks

Continuing my Firefox “quality” rants: I just found the willpower to completely redesign my AJAX framework, going from IFRAMEs to jQuery AJAX calls (replacing straightforward and quite elegant XSL transformations with pages of convoluted JavaScript code) to work around the bugs in FF3.0, only to find out that FF3.5 is even worse and introduced numerous additional “features”.

For example, FF3.5 requires an explicit </script> tag within an XHTML document with proper DOCTYPE. The following document was validated with W3C XHTML validator …

<!DOCTYPE html 
  PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Transitional//EN" 
  "http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-transitional.dtd">
<html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml">
  <head>
  <meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=utf-8" />
  <title>Test</title>
  <script src="… source URL … " type="text/javascript" />
</head>
<body id="body">
</body>
</html>

… but it does not load the script in FF3.5.

Before anyone starts telling me that it’s not so hard to include the closing </script> tag in your source – try telling that to the database with native XML support where I’m storing snippets of the code. I had to convert the field from XML to TEXT (and lose all XML goodies I might eventually get) just to avoid the elimination of the explicit closing tag.

May I make a quick suggestion to the FF developers: maybe, just maybe, you might want to consider supporting existing web applications in parallel with adding new features that not too many people can use (because no other browser supports them yet).

JS-Kit crashes a Blogger blog in Internet Explorer

Several times I’ve stumbled across Blogger-hosted blog that simply refused to open in Internet Explorer with the “Operation aborted” pop-up window and subsequent error page. I never tried to investigate what was going on (I simply copied the URL into another browser), but when I’ve installed JS-Kit on my blog, I’ve started getting the same problems … obviously a cause for a major alarm.

The Infinities Loop site provided an answer in the comments: a SCRIPT performing specific manipulations should be a child of BODY, not another HTML element. When I’ve moved the JS-Kit script (<script src='http://js-kit.com/extra/blogger/comments.js' type='text/javascript'/>) from the Blogger widget to the end of the page, the new fanciful JS-Kit-based comments worked flawlessly.