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POInconsistent Whitespace Text Nodes in Internet Explorer
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  1. POInconsistent Whitespace Text Nodes in Internet Explorer
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    copied!<p>The following source code alerts the following results:</p> <p><strong>Internet Explorer 7</strong>: 29<br> <strong>Firefox 3.0.3</strong>: 37 (correct)<br> <strong>Safari 3.0.4 (523.12.9)</strong>: 38<br> <strong>Google Chrome 0.3.154.9</strong>: 38 </p> <p>Please ignore the following facts: </p> <ul> <li>Webkit (Safari/Chrome) browsers insert an extra text node at the end of the body tag</li> <li>Internet Explorer doesn't have new lines in their whitespace nodes, like they should.</li> <li>Internet Explorer has no beginning whitespace node (there is obvious whitespace before the &lt;form&gt; tag, but no text node to match) </ul> <p>Of the tags in the test page, the following tags have no whitespace text nodes inserted in the DOM after them: <code>form</code>, <code>input[@radio]</code>, <code>div</code>, <code>span</code>, <code>table</code>, <code>ul</code>, <code>a</code>.</p> <p>My question is: <strong>What is it about these nodes that makes them the exception in Internet Explorer?</strong> Why is whitespace not inserted after these nodes, and is inserted in the others? </p> <p>This behavior is the same if you switch the tag order, switch the doctype to XHTML (while still maintaining standards mode).</p> <p>Here's a <a href="http://www.howtocreate.co.uk/wrongWithIE/?chapter=Empty+Space" rel="noreferrer">link that gives a little background information</a>, but no ideal solution. There might not be a solution to this problem, I'm just curious about the behavior.</p> <p>Thanks Internet, Zach</p> <pre><code>&lt;!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.01//EN" "http://www.w3.org/TR/html4/strict.dtd"&gt; &lt;html&gt; &lt;head&gt; &lt;meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=UTF-8"&gt; &lt;script type="text/javascript"&gt; function countNodes() { alert(document.getElementsByTagName('body')[0].childNodes.length); } &lt;/script&gt; &lt;/head&gt; &lt;body onload="countNodes()"&gt; &lt;form&gt;&lt;/form&gt; &lt;input type="submit"/&gt; &lt;input type="reset"/&gt; &lt;input type="button"/&gt; &lt;input type="text"/&gt; &lt;input type="password"/&gt; &lt;input type="file"/&gt; &lt;input type="hidden"/&gt; &lt;input type="checkbox"/&gt; &lt;input type="radio"/&gt; &lt;button&gt;&lt;/button&gt; &lt;select&gt;&lt;/select&gt; &lt;textarea&gt;&lt;/textarea&gt; &lt;div&gt;&lt;/div&gt; &lt;span&gt;&lt;/span&gt; &lt;table&gt;&lt;/table&gt; &lt;ul&gt;&lt;/ul&gt; &lt;a&gt;&lt;/a&gt; &lt;/body&gt; &lt;/html&gt; </code></pre>
 

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