Is the initiator documented anywhere? How come the browser uses it to draw the p...

achairapart · on Dec 9, 2020

While the source looks like JSON, the page is still sent by the server as text/html. Browsers are so resilient to malformed markup that actually parse the content inside the <html> tag at the end of the document (firing the JS script that render the actual page), ignoring all the (pseudo) JSON around.

The page is rendered in QUIRKSMODE because the source is missing the <!DOCTYPE html> at the beginning of the document, to resemble valid JSON.

Well, at least that's clever!

lrossi · on Dec 9, 2020

Thanks for the explanation. It makes sense, but sounds very fragile.

gpnt · on Dec 8, 2020

yes, the initiator is a valid HTML with a `<script>` pointing to the script that receives the JSON and render the page. The interesting part is you can `fetch` the page directly and it will respond a valid JSON.

bluehex · on Dec 9, 2020

Once that script is kicked off it can get the current body of the page (the JSON) and replace it with html with:

    JSON.parse(document.body.innerText);
    document.body.innerText=""
    etc...