Question

I worked out any single instance of document.getElementById("MyID").innerHTML = "A value" in this Javascript World Clock guide causes WordPress Admin not to load completely and breaks various areas of the WordPress admin interface.

I solved it by replacing each instance with jQuery("#MyID").html("A value")) which appears to work fine. What is causing .innerHTML to fail miserably but not JQuery().html()?

Answer 1

This is likely the pertinent part of the jQuery source:

try {
    for ( var i = 0, l = this.length; i < l; i++ ) {
        // Remove element nodes and prevent memory leaks
        if ( this[i].nodeType === 1 ) {
            jQuery.cleanData( this[i].getElementsByTagName("*") );
            this[i].innerHTML = value;
        }
    }

    // If using innerHTML throws an exception, use the fallback method
} catch(e) {
    this.empty().append( value );
}

Note that it handles exceptions thrown.

See it for yourself in 1.5.2.