[whatwg] Inconsistent behavior for empty-string URLs

[Jonas Sicking]

On Tue, Dec 8, 2009 at 1:26 AM, Simon Pieters <simonp at opera.com> wrote:
> On Mon, 07 Dec 2009 22:52:41 +0100, Aryeh Gregor <Simetrical+w3c at gmail.com>
> wrote:
>
>> I don't know why <img src=""> has a special exception.  It would be
>> possible to look through the svn log to see if there was a helpful
>> commit message, or maybe someone will remember.
>
> I seem to remember someone from Mozilla mentioned that they recently changed
> the behavior for img, so Hixie changed the spec for img.

It turns out that <img src=""> is decently common on the web, and in
all cases we saw did *not* intend its literal interpretation (i.e.
display an image using the current baseuri).

So it was deemed as a worth while performance improvement to add code
to suppress the network fetch. For further details see:

https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=444931

/ Jonas