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Re: Object tag crashes Internet Explorer 4.0


From: paulle () MICROSOFT COM (Paul Leach)
Date: Thu, 6 Aug 1998 13:24:34 -0700


-----Original Message-----
From: Joe [mailto:joe () BLARG NET]
Sent: Wednesday, August 05, 1998 2:32 PM

On Tue, 4 Aug 1998, Paul Leach wrote:

<RANT>

Oh give me a break.

OK. I was not paying close enough attention to this case:
--------------cut here-------------------------

<HTML>
<title>It shut down your IE 4.0</title>
<OBJECT CLASSID=#></OBJECT>
</HTML>

--------------and here------------------------
As far as I can tell with my limited knowlege of HTML, it's plain old
invalid input and should have been detected. If that's what provoked your
rant, that part of it was justified.

Now, give me a break -- web pages in general are Turing complete, and it is
not possible to validate, for all such pages, that they don't recurse
infinitely, even though it is possible in many special cases.

When they do recurse past the maximum stack depth, IE flashes the screen and
reappears, having lost knowledge of the last pages you've visited, in every
case I've seen personally or had reported.

Paul



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