In IE8,

document.createElement("tr").style.display

returns an empty string. The default display type of a tr is implicitly

table-row

. Seems like display should return an empty string rather than undefined.

Here is a fiddle displaying the behavior described http://jsfiddle.net/boushley/wuLRT/2/ However, I think the issue has more to do with the fact that the element isn't added to the DOM yet and so we're not quite sure on what the display property is at this point. I think returning an empty string is perfectly valid for an element that's been created an not added to the DOM.

The fiddle also shows that the behavior is similar to that of a div element, and so there is no special case happening here for tr elements.

It should be consistent, whatever it is. Perhaps this should be an enhancement for 'consistently returning display values for elements not in the dom'

It's probably not very high on the list, but worth adding to the queue, likely.

Thank you. I agree that consistency would be the most important thing across different versions. I originally submitted this because I was using the script to determine how a particular browser assigned the display css attribute.

Resetting milestone to future.

I don't think that this is something that we're going to be able to reasonably resolve - it doesn't seem like any technique that we can do will work, even with the latest improvement.

https://github.com/jquery/jquery/commit/1dda994c463f01977c7126407998d61efed218a5

Patches are welcome.