[icedtea-web] RFC: PR766 javaws fails to parse an <argument> node that contains CDATA

[Omair Majid]

On 09/22/2011 01:48 PM, Deepak Bhole wrote:
> * Omair Majid<omajid at redhat.com>  [2011-09-21 16:49]:
>> On 09/19/2011 01:44 PM, Omair Majid wrote:
>>> On 09/19/2011 01:01 PM, Deepak Bhole wrote:
>>>> * Omair Majid<omajid at redhat.com>  [2011-09-16 18:03]:
> ...
> ...
>>> If you mean the parser in icedtea-web chokes on CDATA sections (or
>>> handles these CDATA sections differently) - as shown in the test results
>>> - then yes, that might be a problem. As stated above I intend to write a
>>> patch with additional tests for this. As an additional precaution, I
>>> would like to avoid backporting this patch to any of the release branches.
>>>
>>
>> So I spent some time looking into it and it turns out that the
>> version of NanoXML that we use does not support mixed content [1] -
>> so it's not a problem with using CDATA sections, it's a problem with
>> intermixing text and elements.
>>
>> The good news is that JNLP files should not contain mixed content.
>> Nothing the Oracle's docs [2] suggests that mixed content can occur
>> in JNLP files. Perhaps another thing to consider is that we have not
>> seen any bugs filed about problems in jnlp files caused by mixed
>> content. So this should not occur in practice.
>>
>> Of course, I could implement this, but it turns out that
>> NanoXML/Lite (which is what was embedded in netx) does not support
>> that pretty much by design [3]. NanoXML/Java does support that [3],
>> but I am hesitant to swap out our parser like this. And if I were
>> swapping out the parser, I would rather use a parser meant to handle
>> malformed XML documents - like tagsoup [4] - along with a
>> well-tested XML parser.
>>
>> In fact, after considering the matter, I would like push just the
>> two patches I posted earlier in this thread and close the bug.
>>
>> Any thoughts or comments?
>>
>
> Sorry if I'm missing something, but don't we still need a patch to
> JNLPMatcher to make it not fail when presented with CDATA?
>

I suppose I was not very clear. JNLPMatcher - actually XMLElement (our 
parser) - fails when presented with mixed content. Whether that content 
is just plain text or text escaped using CDATA sections doesnt matter. 
The attached patch converts CDATA section to plain text and the test 
still fails (after apply the two patches I posted earlier in the thread).

JNLPMatcher (and XMLElement) work when text is escaped using CDATA 
sections in the absence of mixed content.

Since we have never seen failures caused by mixed content using plain 
text, I suppose we can assume that failures wont be caused by mixed 
content containing text escaped using CDATA sections.

Hope that clears things up.

Cheers,
Omair
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