Comments on: Unknown runtime error in Internet explorer?

By: Frank Herrman

Frank Herrman — Fri, 21 Nov 2008 13:22:17 +0000

This post and all the comments helped me out a lot. I was facing a similar problem with a Ajax call. I was filling up an div element ‘description’. It raised the unkown runtime error because there was another element with that name…being . So IE doesn’t make any distinction between name and ID attributes.

By: David

David — Mon, 20 Oct 2008 12:35:55 +0000

I was very pleased to discover your page, as I was approaching the hair-tearing stage with one of these. Super-helful, that ‘runtime error’ alert, isn?t it? Especially with the approximate way that IE guesses at line numbers.

Mine was a variation, though. Still Explorer only, so far (no issues in FF, Safari). And still an ‘innerHTML’ DOM issue, AFAIK.

Not a ‘block’ level issue, this time. I thought it could be, since the ‘display’ attribute could be flipping to ‘inline’ as things are switched visible and invisible, but I tried flipping it explicitly to ‘block’ (and it?s a ‘div’, not a ” or a ”. And my script is running the same line to a stack of other ‘div’s, and they all worked fine.

I made it go away when I spotted that 2 ‘div’s had similar IDs (one called ‘SkinSize’, the other called ‘Skins’). Thanks, Bill. I thought the idea of IDs was that they worked on exact equivalence, not loose similarity. So it looks as though IE read the first 4 characters (maybe with a case-insensitive peek at char 5) and thought, ?close enough? then chucked an error when it hit a conflict. That?s a frankly terrifying discovery. Three cheers for Redmond, eh?

Thanks for the pointer. I?m sure there?s more lurking in the murky depths behind this little puzzle. (Sorry for the long post)

By: easyEye

easyEye — Wed, 17 Sep 2008 10:24:28 +0000

glJakaL: Your testpage also worked here. I also made a testpage with my specific needs, and that also worked here. When I inserted it all into my html-templates (that’s how my site works) it didnot work when the input came from ajax, nor when i bypassed ajax by putting the ajax-output in a string. Now when i saved the generated html with the ajax-output in a string, it worked again!

Hence, the problem lies with the way the document is read in. I have seen the problem before in sereveral browsers, when i was working with xml and xslt.

By: glJakaL

glJakaL — Wed, 10 Sep 2008 16:43:58 +0000

easyEye: I added the html closing tag, but it still works for me.
dreamluverz/easyeye: Both of you are using ajax to load the content. Do you use any specific library to do the ajax stuff? And if you don’t, can you share a simple test case (perhaps using pastie so the code looks readable)?
Have you tried calling the ajax page directly from the browser to see what exactly is being returned?

By: dreamluverz

dreamluverz — Wed, 10 Sep 2008 07:40:55 +0000

hi there. juz got back to your site. Can you try using ajax and the return value is a form to be Placed on a div using innerHTML.

By: easyEye

easyEye — Fri, 05 Sep 2008 12:35:18 +0000

Grpmf, your page works here, but your page has no html-closing tag. My HTML-to-insert comes through AJAX and the HTML-to-insert-in is generated (by Apache/2.0.58 (iSeries) Server op 10.0.1.24 Poort 8057) When I work around the AJAX the error remains, so probably the fact that my html is generated makes the error come forward. When I download a generated page and work around the AJAX call, everything works fine in MSIE7. My workaround for generated pages:



function insertHTML(target_reference, source_text){

  //msie7 cannot digest anchors from ajax in generated pages

  

  try {

    target_reference.innerHTML = source_text;

  }

  catch(e) {

    //setup temporary tags; abuse the obsure 'u'-tag

    rep1 = source_text.replace(/\&lt;a /g,'\&lt;u '); 

    rep2 = rep1.replace(/\/g,'\');

    target_reference.innerHTML = rep2;

    false_anchors = target_reference.getElementsByTagName('u');

    //setup new anchor-tags

    for (c=0; c-1; c--) false_anchors[c].parentNode.removeChild(false_anchors[c]);

  }

}

Drawbacks: you cannot use the 'u'-tag in the insert, MSIE7 will ignore floating styles, and the order of HTML-elements is changed

By: glJakaL

glJakaL — Fri, 05 Sep 2008 08:53:55 +0000

easyEye, gimp: strangely, it works for me…
I have uploaded a test page, can you tell me if it’s not working for you?

By: gimp

gimp — Thu, 04 Sep 2008 17:16:28 +0000

Bah as well!

I’m having the same prob, trying to use innerHTML to put an anchor tag inside a div tag… I’d like to avoid appendChild if I can

By: gimp

gimp — Thu, 04 Sep 2008 17:14:53 +0000

I’m having the same prob, trying to use innerHTML to put an inside a … I’d like to avoid appendChild if I can

By: easyEye

easyEye — Thu, 04 Sep 2008 15:56:49 +0000

Bah! I meant: Try for yourself: document.getElementById(’calendar_layer”).innerHTML = ‘Next Month