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Why won't this JavaScript (using document.open and document.write) work in Internet Explorer or Opera?

Answer 1

A:

You should load the content of the iframe with the "src" attribute: the body of an iframe is used by browsers that don't support it to display an alternative message. You are, instead, injecting in the iframe a full, inline, html document and some browsers won't like it. More info here.

If you want to send messages to the iframe from the main document there's a nice tutorial on the John Resig's blog.

Marco Z 2009-11-15 10:00:35

Thanks Marco, but using "src" will not work for my purposes. I was able to create a test <script> to write to the document object of an <iframe> in all of my target browsers (including IE and Opera); the issue is that I could only get that to work using a slightly different set of function calls, not the ideal design that works for me.

Bungle 2009-11-15 12:05:45

I don't know the functional specifications of your project but if you don't need to include an external document why don't you simply add the body of your page in a float element? Your page is seriously not respecting the standard so you'll be at the mercy of the browsers' implementation (in these situations I'm always lucky with FF but not with IE ;) ). From http://www.w3.org/TR/html4/present/frames.html : "The contents of the IFRAME element, on the other hand, should only be displayed by user agents that do not support frames or are configured not to display frames".

Marco Z 2009-11-15 17:40:17

Hi Marco - I'm not sure how this is not standard - an <iframe> is a window like any other, and I'm simply writing to document object of that window. That should be as standard as appending HTML to the <body> element. I'm not appending this text to the node inside of the <iframe> element, which I understand is only used to display alternative text when <iframes>s are disabled or not supported.

Bungle 2009-11-15 20:36:57

Hi, I forgot to mention but the iframe is not supported in the XHTML Strict DTD in your example page.

Marco Z 2009-11-16 00:15:31

bobince 2009-11-16 01:15:40

Answer 2

+2 A:

if I take the guts of the render() function out (i.e., just put them after load() in main.js), this works fine.

Doesn't for me in IE8. If I lose the AJAX call completely and just call render() in main.js, I get the same result. In fact even if I replace the whole of main.js with just:

document.write('hello!');

with or without opening the document, the hello never appears!

If I put any timeout (even 0) on the call to render in main.js, it works. The timeout on the parent document, on the other hand, doesn't seem to be doing anything.

This extreme weirdness is caused by jQuery using a temporarily-inserted <script> tag to execute the code returned by in jsonp.js. If you simply call eval on the return value instead of having jQuery execute it, it works fine.

A related problem I found narrowing down the hello example is demonstrated by index.html:

<body>
<iframe name="foo"></iframe>
<script>
    var idoc= frames['foo'].document;
    idoc.open();
    idoc.write('<body><script src="main.js"><\/script>');
    idoc.close();
</script>

with main.js containing:

document.write('foo');

There is no foo written. (An inline script, on the other hand, was fine.)

If the idoc.close was omitted, it worked. If an additional idoc.write('bar') was added, the bar was written before foo in IE only. If I added both bar and the close call, IE crashed.

So to summarise, there are deep problems using document.write from inside a document that was itself written by document.write! Try to avoid it if at all possible. document.open can be a useful way to populate an iframe from a parent document, but you shouldn't really be needing it inside the child document, where you can use DOM methods on yourself.

bobince 2009-11-16 01:12:04

bobince, thanks a million! Sorry it took so long to accept your answer , but I sincerely appreciate the help. I've since modified my script to avoid using document.write within another document.write, and that has solved these problems. Unfortunately, I now have another issue that I would really appreciate your opinion on: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/1886547/access-is-denied-javascript-error-when-trying-to-access-the-document-object-of

Bungle 2009-12-11 08:12:59

Answer 3

A:

Would something as simple as:

function render(data) {
    document.body.innerHTML = data;
}

Solve your problems? Works in IE8/Win7.

Sam C 2009-11-16 04:25:20

Answer 4

A:

The fundamental problem is that in IE you can't do

iframe_document.open();
iframe_document.write('<script src="foo.js"><\/script>');
iframe_document.close();

Once document.close() is called on the iframe, IE seems to halt all javascript execution there. The js thread runs that document.close() while the http request for foo.js is outstanding, so the file is loaded but never executed.

I haven't found any way for the parent page to know that the script executing within the iframe is completely finished. One work-around is to make foo.js responsible for calling document.close() itself -- not very pleasant, but if you don't mind changing the called script, it does the trick.

Note: you must not document.write('document.close()') into the iframe directly: that causes IE to hang hard. But setTimeout(function(){document.close()}, 0) seems immune — as does a document.close() inside a loaded script sometimes. Ugh. https://connect.microsoft.com/IE/feedback/ViewFeedback.aspx?FeedbackID=366200

Michael Kleber 2009-11-24 21:32:33

Answer 5

A:

That’s bizarre, and Michael Kleber is mistaken: all of the alerts come up just fine, so the problem isn’t that the script doesn’t execute. It does execute.

Observe the following changes to main.js:

$(document).ready(function() {

  // note that render() has to be moved into the window scope
  window.render = function(data) {
    document.open();
    alert('opened');
    document.write(data);
    alert('written');
    document.close();
    alert('closed');
  }

  function load() {
    $.ajax({
      url: 'jsonp.js',
      dataType: 'script'
    });
  }

  window.callback = function(data) {
    // does not work
    render(data);

    // works
    window.data = data;
    var t = setTimeout("render(data)", 0);
  }

  load();

});

steve 2010-03-19 18:41:19

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Why won't this JavaScript (using document.open and document.write) work in Internet Explorer or Opera?

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