Eli Grey

textContent in IE8

By Eli Grey 22 comments

I was creating a testcase for a bug that is present in every browser and I noticed IE still doesn’t support textContent as of IE8. I don’t like having to make code that supports both innerText and textContent so I implemented the standard myself using IE8’s support for ECMAScript 3.1 accessors. The following is all the code that you need to make textContent work in IE8.

if (Object.defineProperty && Object.getOwnPropertyDescriptor &&
     Object.getOwnPropertyDescriptor(Element.prototype, "textContent") &&
    !Object.getOwnPropertyDescriptor(Element.prototype, "textContent").get)
  (function() {
    var innerText = Object.getOwnPropertyDescriptor(Element.prototype, "innerText");
    Object.defineProperty(Element.prototype, "textContent",
      { // It won't work if you just drop in innerText.get
        // and innerText.set or the whole descriptor.
        get : function() {
          return innerText.get.call(this)
        },
        set : function(x) {
          return innerText.set.call(this, x)
        }
      }
    );
  })();

Save it as textContent.js and then include the following code to use it.

<!--[if gte IE 8]><script type="text/javascript" src="textContent.js"></script><![endif]-->
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Why you shouldn’t use XDomainRequest

By Eli Grey Comment

I just recently installed Windows and downloaded IE8 again and it seems that pmxdr works fine with the exception of one small MessageEvent.source bug in the host library that I fixed in version 0.0.5.

I went to check out if the XDomainRequest examples I created worked, and to my astonisment, they ALL failed except for the simplest example. It turns out, contrary to what I assumed of it only not supporting responseXML, XDomainRequest also doesn’t support much of the basic HTTP header functionality offered in XMLHttpRequest, such as setRequestHeader, getResponseHeader, and getAllResponseHeaders. This means that my implementation of XDomainRequest actually offered more functionality than IE8’s implementation.

Due to this, I have changed the XXDomainRequest library to implement a generic XDR constructor and I have renamed the library from XXDomainRequest to libxdr. The examples have been changed to use new XDR() instead of new XDomainRequest() so now every example works in IE8.

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