[whatwg] Form-associated elements and the parser

[Adam Klein]

On Tue, Aug 6, 2013 at 4:09 PM, Ryosuke Niwa <rniwa at apple.com> wrote:
>
> On Aug 6, 2013, at 2:01 PM, Adam Klein <adamk at chromium.org> wrote:
>
>> Hixie opened my eyes last week to parser-association behavior of the
>> sort found at http://software.hixie.ch/utilities/js/live-dom-viewer/?saved=2428.
>> In that case, an <input> in a detached tree is associated with a
>> <form> in the main document. This causes badness in WebKit and Blink
>> because the association between the <form> and the <input> (e.g., as
>> exposed in the HTMLFormElement.elements collection) is only weakly
>> held to avoid reference loops (and thus memory leaks). And that
>> weakness occasionally results in crashes when one of these objects is
>> collected before the other.
>>
>> While all modern HTML parser implementations I tested seemed to agree
>> on their treatment of the above example (they all return "1" as
>> elements.length), this feature doesn't strike me as terribly useful.
>> And for what it's worth, it doesn't seem to be present in legacy IE.
>
> What is the behavior of the old IE?

form.elements.length == 0 in IE 9.

- Adam