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The purpose of this bug is to drive consensus on whether the special-case isindex parsing logic should be removed from the HTML spec. In [1] we see the discussion and ensuing removal of this logic from Google's Blink engine (affecting two user agents). Most recently, in Microsoft's Project Spartan, we've followed Blink's lead for interop. It's too early for us to tell the effect on our compatibility that this will have. Now we will have two browser engines not supporting the parser's fix-up logic. I'd like to see at least Firefox join us and get the spec updated to remove this special case logic to legitimize these recent changes. If not, perhaps there is good reason to keep the spec as-is, and possible reverse Project Spartan's recent decision. Reasons to remove: * I've heard that XSS bypass attacks are more easily possible (the original concern for the Blink removal). * Very little usage of the legacy tag (isindex). Reasons to keep * Compatibility with early HTML [1] https://groups.google.com/a/chromium.org/forum/#!msg/blink-dev/14q_I06gwg8/0a3JI0kjbC0J
Historical context of isindex http://www.w3.org/wiki/HTML/Elements/isindex On Mozilla bug tracker Something related to isindex [1] There's no specific bug asking the removal of isindex (as of today). The latest modifications touching isindex on the tree builder code seems to be Fri, 31 Jan 2014 15:03:24 -0800 [2] I guess Henri Sivonen would know better. [1]: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=616027 [2]: http://hg.mozilla.org/mozilla-central/rev/d7b0c3b046b2#l3.66
For Mozilla I think this is largely up to Henri coupled with a change to the WHATWG specification.
Making this a higher priority to actively seek more feedback on from implementers and webdevs.
HTML5.1 Bugzilla Bug Triage: Fixed This has been removed from the latest draft https://w3c.github.io/html/
Curious decision policy where you ignore the only bit of feedback.
It wasn't removed: https://w3c.github.io/html/syntax.html#the-in-body-insertion-mode contains the same contents as https://html.spec.whatwg.org/multipage/syntax.html#parsing-main-inbody which maintains support for isindex special parsing.
@Anne the isindex element is not supported by Edge and Chrome. Safari, and Firefox still have support for this at this time but we figure it is better to remove stuff from HTML5.1 that has a higher likelihood of going away than to keep stuff. If you think this needs to be kept in the spec. Please open an issue on github or respond to the PR [1]. @Domenic I accidentally hit save change on this before I finished my PR. I was hopeful no one would notice this change until finished writing my PR. [1] - https://github.com/w3c/html/pull/238