[whatwg] Inconsistent behavior for empty-string URLs

Tue Dec 22 02:29:47 PST 2009

On Mon, 21 Dec 2009 20:03:01 +0100, Nicholas Zakas <nzakas at yahoo-inc.com>  
wrote:

> Here are the results of testing various tags with empty URLs across
> different browsers. The table below indicates how many requests are sent
> when the given tag is encountered on the page (curiously, Firefox 3
> sometimes sends two extra requests). Even though the <link> tags don't
> show it in the table, they all had href="".
>
> 					IE7	IE8	FF3	FF3.5
> SF4	Ch3	Op10
> <img src="">			1	1	1	0	1
> 1	0
> <link rel="stylesheet">		0	0	1	1	1
> 1	0
> <link rel="icon">			0	0	2	1
> 1	1	0
> <link rel="shortcut icon">	0	0	2	1	1
> 1	0
> <link rel="prefetch">		0	0	2	0	0
> 0	0
> <script src="">			0	0	1	1	1
> 1	0
> <iframe src="">			0	0	0	0	0
> 0	0
> <input type="image" src="">	1	1	1	0	1
> 1	0
> <object data="">			0	0	1	1
> 0	0	0
> <embed src="">			0	0	0	0	0
> 0	0
> <html manifest="">		0	0	0	0	1
> 0	0
>
> For the most part, no two browsers act the same. Safari and Chrome are
> the closest (not surprising).
>
> Apply a base URL via <base> in all cases didn't change the results,
> except in IE, where it prevented the extra image request from being
> made.

Thanks. IIRC, IE doesn't make a request when using minimized attribute  
syntax, i.e. "<img src>" (because it drops the attribute during parsing).

-- 
Simon Pieters
Opera Software