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Consider this testcase: <iframe name="bar" src="data:text/html,<script>window.name='foo'</script>"></iframe> <script> window.onload = function() { alert(window.foo); alert(window.bar); } </script> This interoperably alerts a Window object and then "undefined" in Chrome, Safari, Opera, Firefox. IE9 seems to go the other way around: undefined and then a window object (have to test with a second real document, afaict, because data: doesn't work in IE9 there). The Chrome, Safari, Opera, Firefox behavior is wrong as the spec is currently written, since the spec only looks at name attributes on <iframe>, not at window names. But it sure looks pretty interoperable except for IE. Note also that the spec as currently written would completely break child window lookup by name in framesets, as far as I can tell, since it only considers <iframe> and not <frame> in step 2 of "determine the value of a named property name when the Window object is indexed for property retrieval". I'm 100% sure this is not web-compatible.
The lack of checking for <frame> is totally an oversight on my part. The other part was because I was testing IE when speccing this, I believe. I can definitely change the "named elements" algorithm to refer to the browsing context name for <iframe> and <frame> elements instead of their name="" attributes, if that's better for compat. What would be ideal is to see if there are any pages that depend on this one way or the other.
This bug was cloned to create bug 17888 as part of operation convergence.
EDITOR'S RESPONSE: This is an Editor's Response to your comment. If you are satisfied with this response, please change the state of this bug to CLOSED. If you have additional information and would like the Editor to reconsider, please reopen this bug. If you would like to escalate the issue to the full HTML Working Group, please add the TrackerRequest keyword to this bug, and suggest title and text for the Tracker Issue; or you may create a Tracker Issue yourself, if you are able to do so. For more details, see this document: http://dev.w3.org/html5/decision-policy/decision-policy.html Status: Accepted Change Description: Patch applied https://github.com/w3c/html/commit/e17fea4b70a2ffc15c15784eaf8c68a36f2c432e Rationale: adopted from WHATWG