“Access is denied” JavaScript error when trying to access the document object of a programmatically-created (IE-only)

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if the document.domain property is set in the parent page, Internet Explorer gives me an “Access is denied”

Sigh. Yeah, it’s an IE issue (bug? difficult to say as there is no documented standard for this kind of unpleasantness). When you create a srcless iframe it receives a document.domain from the parent document’s location.host instead of its document.domain. At that point you’ve pretty much lost as you can’t change it.

A horrendous workaround is to set src to a javascript: URL (urgh!):

 iframe.src= "https://stackoverflow.com/questions/1886547/javascript:"<html><body><p>Hello<\/p><script>do things;<\/script>'";

But for some reason, such a document is unable to set its own document.domain from script in IE (good old “unspecified error”), so you can’t use that to regain a bridge between the parent(*). You could use it to write the whole document HTML, assuming the widget doesn’t need to talk to its parent document once it’s instantiated.

However iframe JavaScript URLs don’t work in Safari, so you’d still need some kind of browser-sniffing to choose which method to use.

*: For some other reason, you can, in IE, set document.domain from a second document, document.written by the first document. So this works:

if (isIE)
    iframe.src= "https://stackoverflow.com/questions/1886547/javascript:"<script>window.onload=function(){document.write(\\'<script>document.domain=\\\""+document.domain+"\\\";<\\\\/script>\\');document.close();};<\/script>'";

At this point the hideousness level is too high for me, I’m out. I’d do the external HTML like David said.

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