Since javascript is a client side implementation (meaning that it is the browser and not the host site (such as is the case with php/perl/other cgi scripting) that actually runs the script) this means I can have endless fun finding out the many ways in which javascript gets completely hosed up.

I mean, take a pretty simple bit of javascripting:
document.getElementById('cleanslate').innerHTML = s;
where s is a nice little list of selectable (checkbox) items in a list to be output.

And then of course, in the html we have:
<span id = "cleanslate"></span>

How much simpler does it get?

Well. It worked beautifully in Firefox.
Didn’t do a single thing in IE6.

And it’s hard to figure out where to even start. In no amount of googling have I found a book, or a faq, or any kind of documentation that extensively details the ways in which Javascript differs from browser to browser. I would think this would be a huge niche. I certainly found many many questions on this stuff. Even if the differences are under constant change, I would still expect at least some online resources to be out there. (Anyone know of any?)

I did find another site that demonstrated a very similar problem: Chameleon but which offered no solution, only the illustration.

After much experimenting, I finally figured out that the issue was really this:

<p>
<span id = "cleanslate"></span>


There is something about the unclosed <p> that IE6 does not like. This actually kind of makes sense — since it’s not closed (yes, I know, slap my hands already), the question is what is the actual DOM? Firefox obviously defaults to something reasonable to handle it, IE6 takes the novel approach of displaying nothing at all. Well the “Sun Java Console” (now there’s a misnomer if there ever was) does come up with the every helpful:
"Unknown run time error on line..."

As an aside: I just gotta love this “Sun Java Console” for its utter uselessness. It’s not even possible to copy and paste the message somewhere for future reference. I can’t make use of IE6 until I close the window. It offers no means of running anything, debugging, tracing, etc. There’s an extension available at Microsoft but even after I jumped through the WGA hoops to download it, when I ran it to install it, it said “No Installation Data available.” It’s particularly annoying after using so many lovely Firefox extensions that enable extensive Javascript debugging.

But here’s the odd part. Removing the <p> altogether fixed IE6. Finishing it off before the opening <span> worked, as well. But enclosing the span within the paragraph did not work. Throughout all these variations, Firefox worked throughout.

Opera, unfortunately, is an entirely different story…! It looks fine, on the first pass. But it’s clearly not actually getting the checkboxed items into its form when the form button on that page is pressed. Ugh.