Another IE Bug

Posted on Jan 13 2005 04:24pm by Luke Davison

This afternoon, I have been working to find out why in Internext Explorer (IE) I can't set the innerHTML value of a SPAN element without IE throwing a "Unknown Runtime Error". Of course, the SAME code works flawlessly in Mozilla/Firefox (Gecko really). First thing I did was consult the MSDN pages for innerHTML, and guess what it says? In a nutshell, it states it should work.

This made me think. Maybe I'm not passing the correct HTML or something stupid like that. So, I started removing elements until I had Testing. That worked. But, I am trying to use

    and
  • . What I found out through trial and error is that you can set SOME elements using innerHTML in IE, but not all of them. So far, the ones that fail are

    ,

      ,
    • , I haven't tested many others. I was able to use CSS and SPAN's to hack around this problem. Just extremely annoying that one has to do that in the first place.

       

      What I wanna know is when the fuck Microsoft will wake up and smell the fucking coffee? How about a browser that actually works fellas? - FUCK!

 

Comments

Anonymous said:
the TR tag also doesn't work, span's to rescue

Anonymous said:
It's by design, read the specs

Man-Chicken said:
This seems to be a problem with the setter for innerHTML. If the data assigned to innerHTML isn't liked by the IE HTML parser, you get this error.

Anonymous said:
here's my code that causes Unknown Error:

document.getElementById("debug").innerHTML="testing";

please, oh please tell me how is this by design ?

Luke Davison said:
All I can say is hopefully Microsoft will try and get it right in IE 7.

bilnaaD said:
hi, i discovered the reason: you cannot add block elements (like div, p, ul) to an inline element (like span). try using a div with display = inline instead of a span. good luck!
ps: excuse me for my bad english, i'm from holland