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“defer” for IE7’s operation aborted error

IE has this "operation aborted" problem (MSDN article) when you try to change your parent while it's not ready.

This is the example they give that causes this error:

<html>
  <body>
    <div>
      <script>
        document.body.innerHTML+="sample text";
      </script>
    </div>
  </body>
</html>

Turns out you can easily solve it by just adding a defer attribute to the script. This works just fine:

<html>
  <body>
    <div>
      <script defer>
        document.body.innerHTML+="sample text";
      </script>
    </div>
  </body>
</html>

Demo page here

BTW, this operation aborted may bite you if you decide to append a script node to the body, like 

var js = document.createElement('script');
js.async = true;
js.src = "http://tools.w3clubs.com/pagr/1.sleep-2.js";
document.body.appendChild(js);

So it's not a good idea to append to the body like this when you don't control the page you're adding this code to, although document.body seems to be always available even when the page doesn't have a <body> tag

This entry was posted on Friday, September 9th, 2011 and is filed under The Blog. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.

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