Comments on: How IE Mangles The Design Of JavaScript Libraries

By: SiteSmart

SiteSmart — Fri, 11 Jan 2008 16:28:39 +0000

And definately don’t forget trying to code around it’s horrible memory leaks.

By: Schill

Schill — Fri, 11 Jan 2008 16:17:07 +0000

@rapehl: Unless I’m mistaken, you shouldn’t be making those kinds of calls anyway – it’s non-standard/IE-only at best.
http://developer.mozilla.org/en/docs/DOM:document.createElement

By: vramdal

vramdal — Fri, 11 Jan 2008 10:33:21 +0000

And let’s not forget the fact that DOM objects in IE doesn’t extend the Object object! That’s why you cannot add methods to, say, the Element object.

By: arapehl

arapehl — Fri, 11 Jan 2008 03:12:58 +0000

Ummm, that was supposed to be document.createElement()…

By: arapehl

arapehl — Fri, 11 Jan 2008 03:11:57 +0000

Let’s not forget IE’s crappy document.createElement implementation.

You cannot assign a name attribute to a node that you create using document.createElement without doing an unholy document.createElement(““).

You also can’t set the “checked” value of a radio button created using DOM methods prior to inserting it into the DOM.

And don’t even think about modifying the DOM before IE is done building it, unless you want an “aborted operation” which results in a completely busted page, i.e. worse than a 404 or 500.

Little maddening things like that is why I tend to yell “IE sucks!” at the top of my lungs at least once a day, and feel completely justified in doing so.

By: Diodeus

Diodeus — Thu, 10 Jan 2008 20:59:13 +0000

I’m all for a Firefox plug-in for IE. That would fix it for good.

By: tj111

tj111 — Thu, 10 Jan 2008 19:43:12 +0000

Very good article. I always had reason to hate IE because of it’s DOM implementations alone. If IE became standardized most JS libraries would be able to significantly reduce their weight. That’s something everyone benefits from