Internet Explorer document.body.appendChild(...) problem
Jan 27, 2009 ·
On my spare time, I build a web app on OS X and thus test my sites in Firefox, Safari and Opera. More seldom, I also verify that it works in Internet Explorer. Or doesn’t.
I have a popup element control that makes it possible to display a div element as a popup, with a semi-transparent background that closes the popup when it’s clicked.
The control worked great in all browsers that I tested it on. However, when I tested it in IE, I found that it couldn’t handle this piece of JavaScript:
document.body.appendChild
Internet Explorer 6 refused to load the page, and alerted that The operation was aborted.
It turns out that if document.body.appendChild(...) is executed within the body tag, before the body is closed, IE 6 will simply not load the page.
To handle this situation, you can:
- wait until the body is loaded, using
body.onload - append the element to another element, instead of the body tag
Waiting for the body to load is not an option in many cases, since it causes the logic to halt while waiting for the event. I don’t recommend it.
Instead, I use the second option. Appending elements to any other element works great and doesn’t require you to change how your page is loaded by Internet Explorer 6.
Discussions & More
If you found this interesting, please share your thoughts on Bluesky and Mastodon. Make sure to follow to be notified when new content is published.