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Asked: 2026-05-13T02:04:02+00:00

I am actually debugging an application for IE8 (after IE6, IE7 now IE8). I

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I am actually debugging an application for IE8 (after IE6, IE7 now IE8). I went received a bug in one of my interface when we were doing an action on a dropdown and I wondered why it wasn’t happening before. I finally found out that a drop down (or a select) calling a method named “role()” directly wasn’t supported.

Does anyone know why?

Here’s an example of the bug:

<!DOCTYPE HTML PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.0 Transitional//EN" >

<html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml">
<head>
<script type="text/javascript">
function rolea(dropdown){
    alert("value");
    //role();
}

function role(){
    alert("value");
}
</script>
</head>
<body>

<select onchange="role()" name="select1">
    <option>a</option>
    <option>b</option>
</select>
</body>
</html>

If we call “role()” it does not work and I receive the error :
Line: 18
Error: Object doesn’t support this action

When I call “rolea()” it works and the JavaScript alert shows up. And also if I try to call “role()” from “rolea()” it also works.

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1 Answer

  1. Editorial Team

    IE8 supports assistive technology, which defines the accessibility features through “role” and “aria” attribute at the nodes. Role is reserved word in IE, inside the DOM scope.

    If you do <select onchange="alert(typeof(role))" name="select1"> you will see that this is a string. Trying to execute string as a function causes error. (To get the alert work, remove your role function declaration and see it in action).

    You can read here more http://dev.w3.org/html5/spec/Overview.html#annotations-for-assistive-technology-products-aria

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