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Editorial Team
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Asked: 2026-06-02T10:36:38+00:00

My code is: <body> <p id=tit></p> <script type=text/javascript> try { document.getElementById(‘tit’).innerHTML = <div>test</div>; }

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My code is:

<body>
    <p id="tit"></p>
    <script type="text/javascript">
        try {
            document.getElementById('tit').innerHTML = "<div>test</div>";
        }
        catch(e) {
            alert(e)
        }
    </script>
</body>

alert [object Error] in IE6/7/8, why?

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1 Answer

  1. Editorial Team

    This (was) by design.

    An element <p> should contain only inline elements, from HTML specs:

    <!ELEMENT P - O (%inline;)* -- paragraph -->

    It may be not so clear but it means that <p> cannot contain a grouping element. Now in the <div> specification we can read:

    The DIV and SPAN elements, in conjunction with the id and class
    attributes, offer a generic mechanism for adding structure to
    documents. These elements define content to be inline (SPAN) or
    block-level (DIV) but impose no other presentational idioms on the
    content.

    The <p> element is not the only one that can contain only inline elements, headers (<h1>, <h2>,…) for example share the same behavior.

    Many browsers allowed malformed HTML to be inserted via innerHTML property so this strange behavior seemed to affect IE only. Newer version (IE 9 at this time) supports insertion of wrong HTML code via script so your HTML fragment won’t cause an error (even if it’s still not valid HTML).

    My suggestion is to insert only valid HTML:
    You may change the container element from <p> to <div>
    -or-

    You may change the inserted element from <div> to <span>

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