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Editorial Team
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Asked: 2026-05-16T19:47:34+00:00

I’m trying to write a web application using the new offline capabilities of HTML5.

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I’m trying to write a web application using the new offline capabilities of HTML5. In this application, I’d like to be able to edit some HTML—a full document, not a fragment—in a <textarea>, press a button and then populate a new browser window (or <iframe>, haven’t decided yet) with the HTML found in the <textarea>. The new content is not persisted anywhere except the local client, so setting the source on the window.open call or the src attribute on an <iframe> is not going to work.

I found the following question on StackOverflow: “Putting HTML from the current page into a new window“, which got me part of the way there. It seems this technique works well with fragments, but I was unsuccessful in getting an entirely new HTML document loaded. The strange thing is when I view the DOM in Firebug, I see the new HTML—it just doesn’t render.

Is it possible to render a generated HTML document in a new window or <iframe>?

EDIT: Here’s a “working” example of how I’m attempting to accomplish this:

<!doctype html>
<html>
<head>
<title>Test new DOM</title>
<script src="http://ajax.googleapis.com/ajax/libs/jquery/1.4.2/jquery.min.js"></script>
<script>
    function runonload() {
        return $("#newcode")[0].value;
    }
    $(function() {
        $("#runit").click(function() {
            w=window.open("");
            $(w.document).ready(function() {
                $(w.document).html(w.opener.runonload());
            });
        });
    });
</script>
</head>
<body>
<textarea id="newcode">
&lt;!doctype html&gt;
&lt;html&gt;
&lt;head&gt;
&lt;title&gt;New Page Test&lt;/title&gt;
&lt;/head&gt;
&lt;body&gt;
&lt;h1&gt;Testing 1 2 3&lt;/h1&gt;
&lt;/body&gt;
&lt;/html&gt;
</textarea>
<br/>
<button id="runit">Run it!</button>
</body>
</html>
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1 Answer

  1. Editorial Team
    $(w.document).html(w.opener.runonload());

    You can’t set innerHTML—or, consequently, jQuery’s html()—on a Document object itself.

    Even if you could, you wouldn’t be able to do it using html(), because that parses the given markup in the context of an element (usually <div>) from the current document. The doctype declaration won’t fit/work, putting <html>/<body>/etc inside a <div> is invalid, and trying to insert the elements it creates from the current ownerDocument into a different document should give a WRONG_DOCUMENT_ERR DOMException. (Some browsers let you get away with that bit though.)

    This is a case where the old-school way is still the best:

    w= window.open('', '_blank');
w.document.write($('#newcode').val());
w.document.close();

    Whilst you can inject innerHTML into a pop-up’s document.documentElement, if you do it that way you don’t get the chance to set a <!DOCTYPE>, which means the page is stuck in nasty old Quirks Mode.

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