The other day I was working on a jQuery browser app that builds a glossary from an XML file. This particular app requires running off a hard drive or a CD in Internet Explorer 6 (Ya, I know. The facility has computer limitations in place).
Everything was going fine until I realized that the XML wasn’t being parsed properly in Internet Explorer (all versions) off of the hard drive. There was no problems when working via a network connection.
Here is the code I was using to parse the XML before I realized the problem:
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$.
get
(
'xml/myXML.xml'
,
{
}
,
function
(
xml
)
{
// parse the XML } |
After some investigation, I discovered there is some security settings in IE that prevents data being parsed directly off of the hard drive. So I had to re-work how I parsed the XML:
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$.
ajax
(
{
url : 'xml/myXML.xml' , dataType : ( $. browser . msie ) ? "text" : "xml" , timeout : 1000 , error : function ( data ) { alert ( 'Error occurred loading the XML' ) ; } , success : function ( data ) { var xml ; if ( typeof data == "string" ) { xml = new ActiveXObject ( "Microsoft.XMLDOM" ) ; xml. async = false ; xml. loadXML ( data ) ; } else { xml = data ; } // parse the xml } ) ; |
What happens is that the XML gets loaded into IE as a text object, then gets converted into usable XML data. Any other browsers get the XML data directly.
So many small little things that you have to go through because of the browser wars. I wish Internet Explorer would just disappear sometimes.