Update: I am getting quite a few page views on this post (for a new blog anyway), but I don’t think it is answering what people are looking for. If you could let me know in the comments WHAT it is you were looking for, maybe I can answer it?
Don’t set image.src to null, otherwise IE tries to load the null image.
I was working on a dynamic image popup that shows a spinning icon until the actual image is loaded and among the few lines of JavaScript code I had this (for reasons not important to this discussion):
// loadImg was created earlier with document.createElement('IMG');
loadImg.src = null;
I did not think about side effects when I wrote this, but expected nothing to happen from this assignment. Turns out Internet Explorer is trying to download an image with the relative path null from the server. I found this during testing when validating expectations of connections made to the server. I guess one could argue that IE is behaving correctly and all the other browsers, which are not requesting anything, are behaving incorrectly. I am not sure. To me null means nothing, which implies that nothing gets loaded.
I changed the logic a bit and removed the offending lines. I should start tracking the amount of time I spend on fixing Internet Explorer-related issues and bill Microsoft, because it is starting to get expensive for me.
