User-Agent: Build Identifier: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US; rv:1.6) Gecko/20040113 If you select text within a web page that contains properly escaped (according to the XHTML 1.0 spec) break tags (e.g. <br />), they are displayed incorrectly as unescaped break tags when you right-click and select View Selection Source. See the URL I've provided for a simple test case. Reproducible: Always Steps to Reproduce: 1. Go to the URL I've provided 2. Select a majority of the text of the page 3. Right-click and choose "View Selection Source" 4. Notice <br /> tags have been converted to <br> 5. Notice in a regular "View Source" of the entire page, they appear correctly Actual Results: Properly escaped break tags were displayed as unescaped break tags. Expected Results: The properly escaped break tags should have appeared exactly as they are in the HTML source. This problem is also evident in one of the latest Firebird builds on Windows: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US; rv:1.7a) Gecko/20040131 Firebird/0.8.0+

the page is sent as text/html, hence it is parsed as HTML, not as XHTML. view selection source shows a serialized DOM, and does therefore not use the xml syntax for empty tags.

> The properly escaped break tags should have appeared exactly as they are in the > HTML source. That never happens with view selection source, since the selection may well contain things that are NOT in the original HTML source (and conversely it may lack things that were in said source).

Maybe I'm just confused, but shouldn't "View Selection Source" be consistent with the code you see when you choose "Page Source" from the View menu, for the most part? I just don't get why you see the <br /> correctly when you choose "Page Source," but see <br> in place of what the developer actually wrote (<br />) when you "View Selection Source" instead. As someone who strives to write standards compliant code, when I view the selection source and see a <br> I worry that I need to update a blog entry, news posting, etc. so I don't break my compliance. Seeing a <br> when I really wrote a <br /> causes unnecessary concern. You guys know the way this stuff works, so I trust you, just don't quite understand the inconsistency.

> Maybe I'm just confused, but shouldn't "View Selection Source" be consistent > with the code you see when you choose "Page Source" from the View menu, for > the most part? There is no way for it to be, since the rendered page is pretty loosely related to the "page source" code... (and in fact often totally unrelated). > I just don't get why you see the <br /> correctly when you choose "Page > Source," Because that reads the HTML text from the cache and shows it. It's not looking at the parsed results but at the original text (more or less). > but see <br> in place of what the developer actually wrote (<br />) > when you "View Selection Source" instead. Because that says "oh, there's a <br> here; I should show that". It has no idea whether that was originally "<br>", "<br/>" or "<br >". That information does not make it into the object model; the parser creates the same data structures in all three cases. This is why the selection source window's title is "DOM Source" -- to make it clear that it's just showing a view of the DOM...

*** Bug 239726 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***

See also bug 251695, same bug for Firefox.

*** Bug 312975 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***

*** Bug 323816 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***

*** Bug 350003 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***

*** Bug 363838 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***

*** Bug 363922 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***