Question

I have a script which appends a newly-created div to the body element onload. I need to keep a reference to that div throughout the application, so I store it in my main global object.

var oMyObj = {};

window.onload = function () {
    oMyObj.eDiv = document.createElement("div");
    document.getElementsByTagName("body")[0].appendChild(oMyObj.eDiv);
};

Nothing particularly ground-breaking, I’m sure you’ll agree. Anyway, it worked absolutely fine until I started testing in IE9. All of a sudden I get an error message saying “オブジェクトの呼び出しが無効です” (I’m currently working in Japan), which sort of translates to “the object call was null/invalid”. Not sure what the precise English version of the error message is.

Anyway, I searched and found (http://d.hatena.ne.jp/wang-zhi/20110503/1304361114 – sorry, also in Japanese) that it was due to the RealPlayer DivX plugin. After disabling the plugin, it worked fine. It also works fine if I use a meta tag to force IE9 to run as IE7. So it is not a major problem. But I would like to know if there is a “correct” way to do what I am trying to do so that it will work in IE9 as IE9. I can only assume that what I am doing now is not what I’m supposed to be doing.

Any ideas?

Answer 1

Okay, well I have confirmation that it was the DivX (not RealPlayer; no idea why I mixed them up) Plugin causing the problem. The plugin overwrites some of the core DOM functionality, including appendChild, which seems insane to me, but whatever. DivX acknowledged the bug and are apparently going to fix it in the next update. Yay, I guess.