[Geoserver-devel] DTD issues in WMS GetCapabilities responses

Speaking of Internet Explorer compatibility, I am investigating some problems with the capabilities documents that GeoServer produces for WMS 1.1.1 GetCapabilities requests. It seems that all versions of IE are a bit stricter than other browsers in enforcing XML schemata - if a document doesn’t validate according to its DTD then IE simply won’t let JavaScript have access to the DOM. We don’t change the DTD for VendorSpecificCapabilties in WMS 1.1.1 so this means that IE-based clients simply can’t use our Capabilties documents.

I see that this issue was actually reported a while ago (https://jira.codehaus.org/browse/GEOS-5277) and then closed as not-a-bug by the reporter with no comment. So is there a reason that we shouldn’t modify the DTD? It would be quite awkward for us to have to change the capabilities document for IE, so if we can just handle DTD the same way in WMS 1.1.1 as in 1.3.0 I would much prefer that solution.


David Winslow
OpenGeo - http://opengeo.org/

I see that this issue is already fixed. Sorry for the noise; I was testing against an old snapshot of the 2.1.x series.


David Winslow
OpenGeo - http://opengeo.org/

On Thu, Oct 18, 2012 at 11:48 AM, David Winslow <dwinslow@anonymised.com> wrote:

Speaking of Internet Explorer compatibility, I am investigating some problems with the capabilities documents that GeoServer produces for WMS 1.1.1 GetCapabilities requests. It seems that all versions of IE are a bit stricter than other browsers in enforcing XML schemata - if a document doesn’t validate according to its DTD then IE simply won’t let JavaScript have access to the DOM. We don’t change the DTD for VendorSpecificCapabilties in WMS 1.1.1 so this means that IE-based clients simply can’t use our Capabilties documents.

I see that this issue was actually reported a while ago (https://jira.codehaus.org/browse/GEOS-5277) and then closed as not-a-bug by the reporter with no comment. So is there a reason that we shouldn’t modify the DTD? It would be quite awkward for us to have to change the capabilities document for IE, so if we can just handle DTD the same way in WMS 1.1.1 as in 1.3.0 I would much prefer that solution.


David Winslow
OpenGeo - http://opengeo.org/