Zotero 2.0rc5 causing errors in Firefox 3.6 Error Console

Rare Collections
The Zotero add-in seems to be causing me issues with web pages when the add-on is enabled. This simple html page (see below) returns an error in the Error Console that states: "mismatched tag.Expected:</img>". If I disable the add-in then there are no errors. It seems like the add-in is making Firefox think it is an xml document... Here is the html to recreate the issue. The Zotero add-in should not be throwing errors nor having any affect on pages when it is not actively being used... For instance, if the page contains some JavaScript with ampersands then it gives you messages that look really bad and less benign...

<!DOCTYPE HTML PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.01//EN"
"http://www.w3.org/TR/html4/strict.dtd">
<html><head></head>
<body>
<img src="http://guillermo.tela.com/images/From95.jpg">
</body>
</html>
  • ajlyon
    As I noted when you first posted this, the error completely harmless and arises because Zotero is parsing the page as pure XML, in which you'd need a close tag for <img>.

    Can you post URLs of actual, real webpages that have "issues"?

    Plenty of pages will trigger errors, with or without Zotero. It's only a real concern if Zotero causes display or usage issues with real websites.
  • Rare Collections
    Hello,

    Firefox is giving a different behavior if the html is coming from the web (an http server) vs running locally (e.g. file:///C:/Data/test3.html) - you can save this example and test it to see the results (try with the Zotero add-in enabled/disabled). The bottom line is that Zotero cannot be throwing errors that look like real errors on web pages... Add-ins cannot interfere with the normal operation of the browser.

    <!DOCTYPE HTML PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.01//EN"
    "http://www.w3.org/TR/html4/strict.dtd">
    <script type="text/javascript">
    if (1 == 1 && 2 == 2) {
    var a = 1;
    }
    </script>
    <html><head></head>
    <body>
    <p>Hi Mom</p>
    </body>
    </html>
  • ajlyon
    I agree that Zotero shouldn't cause errors to show up unless there truly are errors.

    It does matter, however, whether these are limited to when you load local files; if it happens in normal web browsing, then that's a much more concerning problem. Please provide URLs for actual, live webpages that throw errors only with Zotero enabled, if there are such sites.

    Otherwise, it looks like this has to do with Zotero using some of its import translators on local files when they are loaded, and those translators trying to parse HTML as if it were nice XML. This too should be fixed, but it's not nearly as serious.
  • dstillman
    Yes, Zotero runs the import translator detection code on local files so that it can show the address bar icon for supported formats. One or two of those translators—MODS, maybe RDF—require an XML parsing mode that logs parsing errors to the error console. That may not be avoidable (at least without using a less efficient parsing method), since the error it's logging is an XML well-formedness error, not an exception, but I don't know for sure. Either way, the errors are harmless, and if you use Console2 you can hide XML errors.

    This shouldn't happen on web pages loaded via HTTP, since import detection isn't run on them.

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