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You’ve probably never heard of Eric Vasilik but his work affects millions on a daily basis.  He is a programmer and also the creator of the innerHTML element property.

The innerHTML element property is commonly used in Javascript (and therefore Ajax) scripts that so many sites use these days.  Basically anything on the web that is dynamicly updated without a page reload is probably using the innerHTML property to change content.

Web developers may know that using innerHTML on <table> elements does not work in Internet Explorer.  And the reason for this? Eric Vasilik didn’t implement it properly way back in IE3 when he was writing the parser for the DOM almost 12 years ago!

Yes he is the inventor of innerHTML but he is also the cause of a lot of modern headaches!  The funny thing is, his misimplementation came back to bite him in the butt 10 years later.

Luckily, the workaround for this problem is pretty simple but the morale of the story is: poor coding not only affects everyone, even you!

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This entry was posted on Monday, March 2nd, 2009 at 2:45 pm and is filed under programming, Web Development. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.