IE Browser stops responding after window.open() window closed

[TM360]

I realize this may not be the right group to post this, but I'm not having
much success elsewhere so I thought I'd give it a try...

In our application we have a link that opens a new window displaying the
contents of a page that can be customized by our end users. When we call
window.open() we save the resulting window reference so that if users
navigate away from our application we can close the window.

One of our customers has created a page using MS Word. I believe they are
saving it as a "Web Page", not a "Single File Web Page". When they click on
the link to open the window to display this page the page loads fine. The
problem is that when they close the window, the original window that opened
the pop up is frozen (i.e. it stops responding).

Something else that is really strange is that if we skip storing the window
reference returned by window.open(), the problem does not occur.

This only occurs on certain versions of IE 6. I am able to reproduce the
problem on IE 6.0.2800.1106 running on Win2K Pro.

This doesn't occur if the page that is opened just contains standard HTML.
I can't even reproduce it when I create my own test page using Word.

Has anyone else experienced anything like this before?

 

[RobG]

TM360 wrote:
[...]

This only occurs on certain versions of IE 6. I am able to reproduce the
problem on IE 6.0.2800.1106 running on Win2K Pro.

This doesn't occur if the page that is opened just contains standard HTML.
I can't even reproduce it when I create my own test page using Word.

I am tempted to say 'post the offending HTML', but knowing Word, it
will be seriously bloated and more hassle that it's worth.

Try removing slabs of stuff from the Word page until you have just the
bare minimum that still displays the behaviour. If what remains is
small enough, post it.

Alternatively, remove all the Word-specific stuff and leave just
'clean' HTML - there are a number of cleaning programs around (though I
can't recommend any, I never use Word to generate HTML!). There will be
slabs and slabs of style garbage that can be removed (anything starting
with 'mso-') and likely anything within '<!--[if gte mso 10]> ' tags.

Good luck.

 

[TM360]

I figured out the offending "HTML". When you save a document as a web page
in Word it embeds some tags/attributes in the HTML to support Word Smart
Tags. The offending attribute was in the HTML tag:

xmlns:st1="urn:schemas-microsoft-comffice:smarttags"

If I remove just this attribute, the problem goes away. Fortunately I don't
think this customer is actually using Smart Tags in their document. So in
the Tools | Options | Save tab they can just uncheck the checkbox labeled
"Embed Smart Tags". The new file no longer contains the Smart Tag support
and the problem goes away.

Of course I wish I could tell them to stop using freakin' Word as their HTML
editor, but alas...

I know this group is supposed to just be about JavaScript, but I thought I'd
post the solution here just in case anybody else has the same problem.

Thanks for the help.

TM360 wrote:
[...]

This only occurs on certain versions of IE 6. I am able to reproduce the
problem on IE 6.0.2800.1106 running on Win2K Pro.

This doesn't occur if the page that is opened just contains standard
HTML.
I can't even reproduce it when I create my own test page using Word.

I am tempted to say 'post the offending HTML', but knowing Word, it
will be seriously bloated and more hassle that it's worth.

Try removing slabs of stuff from the Word page until you have just the
bare minimum that still displays the behaviour. If what remains is
small enough, post it.

Alternatively, remove all the Word-specific stuff and leave just
'clean' HTML - there are a number of cleaning programs around (though I
can't recommend any, I never use Word to generate HTML!). There will be
slabs and slabs of style garbage that can be removed (anything starting
with 'mso-') and likely anything within '<!--[if gte mso 10]> ' tags.

Good luck.