Page reloading and malformed HTML problems in a XULRunner based app.

Question

Hello,

I am writing an application on XULRunner that displays HTML pages from the web:

I have a very simple XUL file with a in which is just a filling the window and loading a local HTML file. In my HTML, I have an iframe to load content. What's cool with XULRunner is that I can access the content of the iframe for many things (display page title, images...)

What's not cool at all is that, unlike what I had when my app was running in a browser, I have two big bugs with some pages:

1) Some (many?) pages (like "yahoo.fr" have malformed HTML content, especially for tag where the tag is not closed (the IMG tag without the /> at the end). ==> This does not bother Firefox but in my app, XULRunner does not decode the HTML and thus display the rough HTML source code in the page.

2) On some pages, like, for now, the home of nytimes.com, the login page of bloglines.com and of yahoo.fr, "something" happens in the iframe that causes the src of my tag (that is my app that SHOULD NEVER CHANGE) to change thus closing my app. ==> I guess it may be linked to an attempt to open in another window.

Does anyone have a clue to solve these two problems? Better version of XULRunner (I am using 1.9.1)? XUL options to prevent a page to open in new window? Others?

Thanks for your help,

J.

Answer 1

Rather than a <iframe/>, use a <browser type="content-primary"/>. That will solve your second problem (by letting the system know that the contents of that frame belongs to the web and shouldn't be able to change you).

The first question really depends on how things are being loaded. Are they from http, or from a previously-saved local file? Do you useful mime types and things from the server? Or, if local, what file extension do you end up with?