CODEWITHSUNDEEP
javascriptinternet-explorerinnerhtml
atwixtor
atwixtor

Reputation: 804

Replacing document.documentElement.innerHTML in Internet Explorer

The following works flawlessly (as far as I can tell) in all other browsers:

document.documentElement.innerHTML = "<head></head><body>Testing</body>";

But chokes in IE (I tested IE9), with a console error:

SCRIPT600: Invalid target element for this operation.

...referencing the first character of the line of code above.

Why won't this work in IE, but will work in all other browsers? I read somewhere that innerHTML has issues replacing 'TBODY' elements, but I tested this line of code after removing all TBODY children and the same error occurred.

I know this sounds like bad-news-code, but it is the only option I have left with the very limited and simplistic CMS website we are being forced to use. I'm only thankful that the CMS allows scripts to be executed.

In essence, I need to be able to completely gut the HTML contents and use my own. Again, this works fine on other browsers.

Other notes:

Upvotes: 5

Views: 6892

Answers (2)

Serg
Serg

Reputation: 7475

document.open("text/html", "replace");
document.write("<head></head><body>Testing</body>");
document.close();

Upvotes: 2

atwixtor
atwixtor

Reputation: 804

As both @duri and I confirmed, the documentElement (<html>) object along with a handful of other certain HTML elements are read-only in Internet Explorer (see link in first comment), and therefore replacing the documentElement in a cross-browser fashion is not possible.

Using Javascript to strip all existing link and script tags from the head, then to set the body attributes to match the replacement content, then to replacing the innerHTML of the body, and finally dynamically adding my own script, meta, and css tags as children of the head, achieves nearly the same thing.

Thanks to @duri for the workaround tip!

Upvotes: 1

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