Debugging Markup/JavaScript with IE 8's developers tools

Question

I'm working on a site and it is constantly failing with the following in IE8:

Message: HTML Parsing Error: Unable to modify the parent container 
element before the child element is closed (KB927917)
Line: 0
Char: 0
Code: 0

What is the best way to troubleshoot this for IE8? IE7 compatibility mode does not solve the problem. Firefox gives no complaints.

Also, when I View Source from IE, it appears to be truncated.

This is a Joomla! site.

Thanks!

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Edit

I was able to solve the problem by selectively turning on and off different components. My overall question is - how do i effectively hunt-down these errors especially since it does not provide any location of the error?

Answer 1

It's difficult to know what's causing this error, since your installation may have a lot of different components, plugins and modules installed, each one with different implementations.

I would try to search KB927917 on google, read the error description in microsoft support center to understand the problem, and them search for KB927917 joomla.

This seens to be an issue with Virtuemart component as described in Joomla official forums. If you don't have virtuemart installed, try this approach instead.

If none of these approaches are going to solve your problem, I recommend you to keep searching, maybe someone may have the same Joomla setup as yours with the same strange IE8 behavior.

Answer 2

This sounds like the ol' Operation Aborted error. Microsoft describe it in detail in the following blog entries:

http://blogs.msdn.com/ie/archive/2008/04/23/what-happened-to-operation-aborted.aspx
http://blogs.msdn.com/ie/archive/2009/09/03/preventing-operation-aborted-scenarios.aspx

Operation aborted errors are gone from IE8 and instead,

When the HTML parser throws the operation aborted exception, rather than announce this error to the world, Internet Explorer 8 Beta 1 discreetly tucks this information away into the list of script errors associated with the webpage and stops parsing HTML

Naturally, IE8 final follows the same logic, abandoning the parsing operation for the rest of the page, giving the truncated appearance. If you load the same page in IE7 (not IE8 compat) or IE6, the site will throw an operation aborted error dialog and navigate to an error page when you click the OK button.

As for how you would hunt down the error, if you can find out which component is causing the issue, then you should be able to search your files for HTML similar to that of the section just before the document stops parsing. Alternatively, search all the component's files for <script> tags inside the body and study the code inside and around it to see if it falls into the traps outlined in IEBlog's explanation of the problem.