User-agent: Mozilla Thunderbird 1.0.2 (Windows/20050317)
Hi,
I'm having trouble using the xmlhttprequest object on Safari 2.0. It
seems the behavior concerning the handling of redirects on the page I'm
GETing is inconsistent across browsers, and Safari's is the least
elegant, to put it mildly.
I'm developing an in-house web app that uses the xmlhttprequest object
to fetch data from a server. The request goes through an authentication
system called Bluestem
(https://www-s.uiuc.edu/bluestem/notes/index.html), which basically
redirects the http request to a login page on the initial connection,
and whenever the session has expired (2 hrs of inactivity). Since the
user authenticates when the web app is loaded, the subsequent
xmlhttprequest's are allowed, and work fine in the latest versions of
Safari, Opera, Firefox, and IE.
The problem comes when the Bluestem session has expired. If the user
then initiates an xmlhttprequest by interacting with the web app,
instead of receiving the typical response from the server (200), it
receives a 302 with Location: header pointing to the login page. The
subsequent behavior by the user agent is inconsistent across the
browsers. The document at
http://whatwg.org/specs/web-apps/current-work/#senddata states:
"If the response is an HTTP redirect, then it should be transparently
followed (unless it violates security or infinite loop precautions). Any
other error (including a 401) must cause the object to use that error
page as the response."
I'm not sure if this is any sort of definitive spec, but would be nice
if there was one. Firefox returns a request status of 302, IE returns 0
(if I'm remembering correctly), Opera transparently follows the redirect
(returning the login page html as the responseText), but Safari simply
crashes between readyState-s 1 and 2. The whole browser just
disappears, and then I get the crashed/try-again dialog.
It should crash Safari 2.0 while doing the initial update. On other
browsers, you should see a "Bluestem authentication required" error
message in the title bar.
Please let me know if there's anything I can do to fix the problem, or
if more information is needed. Also, if any of the above links don't
work (except the last), or if this is the wrong list to post this report
to, please inform me.
Thanks,
Mike Ter Louw
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