Solution for HTML5 in IE

[jonathantneal]

I wanted to propose some solutions to be used for some major HTML5 issues in IE6, IE7, and IE8, especially in regards to javascript and jQuery.

Issues / Solutions:

1. HTML5 is not supported on a document, html5 elements will not properly contain contents
   • document.createElement('X') triggers support for 'X' element (you know this one, it's the "shiv I mean shim" method)
2. HTML5 is not supported with innerHTML
   • HTML5 added with innerHTML is supported when the element being innerHTML'd is already appended to a shim'd document (or document fragment!)
3. <HTML5_elements> become <:HTML5_elements> when element is cloneNode'd
   • use an alternate cloneNode function, the default is broken and should not be used in IE anyway (for example: it should not clone events)

Example of solutions, in action, with comments:

​http://pastie.org/935834

---

EDIT by paulirish.. the scope of this ticket it only to fix #2 and #3. the markup in the document will still require the basic html5shiv/modernizr to adjust.

this fix will correct the assumption that "jquery is broken" because it cannot handle ajax'd in html5 content and the like.

[dmethvin]

Take a look at modernizr for this, it's kind of heavy to put into jQuery core because everyone would pay the price for it.

[SlexAxton]

We've talked about different ways to handle this in the 1.5 feature list. I'm going to open this back up as something we are actively considering.

[paul.irish]

#5327 is a duplicate of this ticket.

[paul.irish]

The major problem is dealing with new elements either ajax'd in or created on the fly... issue #2 of Jon's above.

More detail from the closed dupe #5327 is here: : ​http://stackoverflow.com/questions/1191164/jquery-html5-append-appendto-and-ie

Test case: ​http://jsfiddle.net/DVnmE/

Remy's test case: ​http://jsbin.com/olizu

[john]

So right now we're looking for a good patch to this. I'm going to bring it up again for 1.7. If we had had a patch for 1.6, it probably would've landed then.

[Timmy Willison]

#9049 is a duplicate of this ticket.

[john]

Nominating ticket for 1.7 discussion.

[Rick Waldron]

+1, I believe we said we'd try this, but I'm beginning to think we should first try out a plugin.

[jaubourg]

+1, Gain is obvious but what is the cost in size?

[Timmy Willison]

+1, I would use this a lot.

[ajpiano]

+1, I'm for this and it would be a boon for many, but the problem isn't size - it's speed. We'd need to see a patch and do a lot of perf analysis..

[paul.irish]

+1, major painpoint for developers.

[dmethvin]

+1, Fan of a team-supported solution, but first as a plugin and not in core for 1.7

[Rick Waldron]

See also: #6286

[john]

+1, Only if this can be done in such a way that doesn't cripple performance.

[scottgonzalez]

+1, I'd like to see performance impact

[paul.irish]

I was working with jdbarlett on a new version of innerShiv ​http://jdbartlett.github.com/innershiv/ that is much faster...

​https://gist.github.com/7e1c3c76db44e5a249ff is the general idea.

We feature test to see if the shiv is necessary, and we also regex against the input to see if we should even bother shiv'ing it. If it is, then we innerHTML it into an on-DOM div and grab the new childNodes which we'll use in a docFragment.

Currently it supports two signatures:

    innerShiv(htmlstring) // documentFragment
    innerShiv(htmlstring, false) // array of nodes

But that clearly could be simplified for its purposes within jQuery.

From a perf standpoints the questions I have are:

• does the --- 1) add a node to the dom 2) innnerHTML inside of it 3) pull it off --- trick have a significant hit?
• is the regex against the incoming string worth it?

I'm gonna be quite busy, but I'll try to take a stab at this within jQuery and get some perf numbers, sometime, if no one else beats me to it. Help requested :)

[addyosmani]

+1

[ajpiano]

+1, especially if we're able to limit its impact in the ways paul describes above

[jzaefferer]

+1

[paul.irish]

Started looking at the code around this and I'm gonna leave my notes, in case they can help someone else...

Talked with jdbarlett about this at TXJS and we agreed the shiv'ing approach within Shimprove ​http://www.iecss.com/shimprove/ is probably a better choice here. Well, actually ​the pastie jon linked in this issue's description has that code in a more readable format.

Essentially, that approach is this:

var frag = document.createDocumentFragment();
frag.createElement('abbr');
frag.createElement('aside');
// etc, ...

// fragment can now accept unknown element nodes

It looks like we'll want test coverage for:

• html() when using the innerHTML shortcut fast path
• clone()
• append/prepend/before/after/replaceWith and appendto/prependto/insertbefore/insertafter/replaceAll and wrap/wrapInner/wrapAll ... all use domManip so really only a single code path there should be sufficient.

Implementation notes:

• Appears as though everything is within manipulation.js
• buildFragment() is used by domManip and looks to be the right place to improve things
• a docFrag is made before sending it off to jQuery.clean() along with the html string. We could shiv it before clean or maybe within clean

Open questions:

• regex to test against incoming html? (or some indexOf magic?)
• There is an innerHTML set action inside of clean(). Does that collapse unknown elements, or no, since it's still off-dom?

[paul.irish]

WIP here: ​https://github.com/paulirish/jquery/commits/ticket6485

• unit test coverage and $.support.unknownElems added.

so far, the .innerHTML use from within clean() is looking like trouble that'll have to be worked around

[aspilicious]

Drupal is working on his drupal8 release. We are planning to include shiv (inner shiv) stuff because we are going to go html5 all the way. BUT apparantly jquery is going to integrate those things for us in their next release.

Correct? When will this happen? 3 months? 6 months? a year? I would like to get this info so we can make a roadmap for drupal8.

Thnx!

[jon_neal]

I tracked the bugs down to manipulation.js, within the clean function, specifically where html strings are converted into DOM nodes; the line that reads.

div = context.createElement("div")

This element is used to append the strings, and it's not part of a shimmed document. I successfully experimented by adding the following.

html5elementsArr = 'abbr|article|aside|audio|canvas|datalist|details|figcaption|figure|footer|header|hgroup|mark|meter|nav|output|progress|section|subline|summary|time|video'.split('|'),
html5elementsArrLen = html5elementsArr.length,
html5elementsArrCar = -1,						
html5safeFrag = context.createDocumentFragment();
if (html5safeFrag.createElement) while (++html5elementsArrCar < html5elementsArrLen) html5safeFrag.createElement(html5elementsArr[html5elementsArrCar]);
html5safeFrag.appendChild(div);

Of course, this html5safe fragment could have been previously generated, but for experimental purposes it worked, completely. I ran the unit tests that Paul Irish shared, and loaded up old IE7 and IE8. They passed: 100%.

[paul.irish]

I think we got success here. :)

I can take point to integrate that code in jquery style, commit that and PR it.

The test suite index.html will also need the basic html5 shiv run on it for some of these new tests to pass in IE. I hope that's okay.

[paul.irish]

Committed Jon's raw patch to my branch.. ​https://github.com/paulirish/jquery/commits/ticket6485

snover indicates we'll probably need a test similar to ​https://github.com/jquery/jquery/commit/0a0cf/#diff-1

for this patch.

[Rick Waldron]

Is there anyway that we can handle creation of elements without maintaining an internal hard-coded list? I seem to recall seeing something somewhere...

[john]

#9496 is a duplicate of this ticket.

[paul.irish]

snover gave some feedback to Jonathan the day we were working on this that was useful so I tracked it back down and it's cleaned up and available here ​http://oksoclap.com/fNZvdYRdAU

[Rick Waldron]

Worked on this today, but ultimately, I'm hitting walls. Here are screen shots of one of the tests when I pull the branch as-is (resolving a minor conflict is required)

IE8 ​http://gyazo.com/950889903bb10ad7e947ef221b9b2a16.png

IE7 ​http://gyazo.com/127aca2933a2f3905bdcc80ba07ae23f.png

IE6 ​http://gyazo.com/4a16f40faf1fe6c4da40b83949d359c8.png

When I change the test to use:

article.width()

The result changes in IE8

​http://gyazo.com/f524046a6b4b7aa51ab83f2adb54c804.png

[Rick Waldron]

More research stuff...

Running this fiddle: ​http://jsfiddle.net/rwaldron/t6hqK/show

Produces the following results:

IE vs. FF ​http://gyazo.com/4f54690fa9126ea78285b71518d97c76.png

IE6, 7, 8 ​http://gyazo.com/de3be2b41f306b06ec9cc86269f7a3d8.png

[jonathantneal@…]

rwaldon, unless specified by the browser or the CSS, elements are display: inline by default, so IE is handling them the way it would normally handle inline elements

Running this fiddle: ​http://jsfiddle.net/t6hqK/5/show/

Produces the following results in IE6: ​http://s4.postimage.org/5hrhkupqg/ie6_html5.png

[Rick Waldron]

Request for review: ​https://github.com/jquery/jquery/pull/490/

[Rick Waldron]

#10283 is a duplicate of this ticket.

[Haprog]

+1, I just spent a whole day at work figuring out why my code breaks on IE8 and older. It would really help if there was a good solution to this issue.

[Rick Waldron]

@Haprog This is coming in 1.7, barring any disastrous findings :)

[Rick Waldron]

Landing pull request 490. 1.7 HTML5 Support for innerHTML, clone & style. Fixes #6485.

More Details:

• ​https://github.com/jquery/jquery/pull/490
• ​http://bugs.jquery.com/ticket/6485 Changeset: 9ecdb2472be7661477564e46bce51432d4a5a84e

[ajpiano]

#10427 is a duplicate of this ticket.

[bmustiata]

If I may, I think this issue should be extended to really support unknown elements for IE7/8. The problem is that the current implementation has a list of unknown elements.

This causes in my view (at least) two problems:

1. If tomorrow html5 decide to add a new element, old versions of the applications that use the current jQuery version will suddenly stop working until they upgrade their jQuery, and for any new element this list must be upgraded.
2. This approach also doesn't allow custom elements to be created that are not (and will never be) part of HTML5. We are actually using this in an application, where we create custom rendered metadata nodes on the fly (we receive them via AJAX). Elements are things like <loop>, <metatarget>, etc.

I am currently working on a fork where I try to allow creation of completely unknown elements, because currently (in the 1.7 beta):

jQuery('<customelement>some content</customelement>');

has a different outcome in IE8 than in IE9 (or any other decent browser).

I hope you find these requirements acceptable for reopening this, or even better in my opinion reopening the duplicate issue 10427. (since HTML5 support is implemented, and only custom elements are not working).

[jdbartlett]

Perhaps it'd be more appropriate to open a new bug for this (please yell if so), but it looks like this has been marked "fixed" prematurely; I tried innerShiv's test page with jQ1.7b2 and Test 2 (which checks for innerShiv support built into jQuery) fails in IE8 :o :( :_(

​http://jsbin.com/igerig

Looking at the DOM tree, IE seems to be recognizing the elements properly, and I can style them if I use class names, but it's not styling based on tag names alone.

[Rick Waldron]

I'm not at a machine that I can test from, but the first thing that comes to mind is that you'll still need to shiv/shim (whatever) the elements themselves - jQuery has no intention of providing that.

[Rick Waldron]

Sorry, my mobile browser seems to like to remove urls from the original description text

[anonymous]

Yeah, innerShiv's test page includes Rem's HTML5shim (otherwise none of the tests would pass at all) -- it's actually the test set I used when developing the original innerShiv. jQuery 1.7's HTML5 support is substantially the same technique as innerShiv, which is why it's so odd that this isn't working. Either I've done something really stupid in the test page, or something's going on between the HTML being cleaned and appended that's causing the breakage.

[jdbartlett]

(That last "anonymous" was me again, BTW!)

[Rick Waldron]

Would be nice if all of those tests appeared on screen without the need for scrolling. I screen capped this: ​http://gyazo.com/d02e3887ccc6c561915421e43cad02b8.png running in IE7 via BrowserStack - not sure if that's even useful or meaningful

[jdbartlett]

It's just the 2nd test that's affected (the other tests use innerShiv). Here's another version with the other tests removed:

​http://jsbin.com/igerig/3

Expected result (seen in IE9 and good browsers): ​http://d.pr/MKFP Actual result (seen in IE6, IE7, IE8): ​http://d.pr/SSZk

HTML5shim is included (line 27 of the source). Line 51 of the source shows the test that's being used.

[Rick Waldron]

Maybe I'm missing something... I see the same thing in both screenshots.

[jdbartlett]

Ah. The section element's background color in the IE<=8 screenshot is red, whereas it's red in the IE9 screenshot.

But never mind that! Here's an even simpler demonstration:

​http://jsbin.com/obomec

In this demonstration, jQuery appends a section to an article. The CSS uses the "section" tag as a selector to style the section's background pink. Works in all good browsers, but not in IE <= 8. :(

Here's exactly the same code, but using a class name ("pink") instead of an HTML5 tag name as a selector:

​http://jsbin.com/obomec/2/

When using a class name as a selector instead of a tag name, the page is styled successfully.

innerShiv uses _exactly_ the same technique as the jQuery 1.7 fix, but I've never before encountered this problem with being able to style based of class selectors but not tags, which is why I suspect something's happening between the innerShiv fix and the append.

Hope that helps clarify the problem.

[jdbartlett]

"The section element's background color in the IE<=8 screenshot is red, whereas it's red in the IE9 screenshot."

Ugh. Obviously, I meant to say:

"The section element's background color in the IE<=8 screenshot is red, whereas it's GREEN in the IE9 screenshot."

GREEN! GREEN, damn it! There is a difference! Honest! :)

But anyway. The other demonstration is much easier code to read.

[Rick Waldron]

Dig it: ​http://bugs.jquery.com/ticket/10501

[heruan@…]

Is the cloning issue fixed? I still get <:section></:section> on cloned <section>s in IE8 (with jQuery 1.7 and html5shiv).

• ​http://jsbin.com/usogez/2/

[Rick Waldron]

Fix is coming in 1.7.1

[anonymous]

I'm using 1.7.1 and I still get the ":"-bug using clone(). Are there any news regarding this bug?

[anonymous]

This is still happening as of 1.8, anyone have a fix for this they would like to share?

[dmethvin]

This is still happening as of 1.8, anyone have a fix for this they would like to share?

I have no idea what "this" you are referring to but I am sure it can be answered better on a forum than on a closed bug tracker ticket.

[anonymous]

I think 'this' is referring to cloning still not working. I have the same problem using 1.8.2 with Modernizr 2.6.1.