237541 - Getelementbyid('id').innerHTML="this" doesn't work unless "id" div tags already contain something...

Status: RESOLVED DUPLICATE of bug 237536

(Firefox :: General, defect)

Description

[Laurie Knight]

User-Agent:       Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US; rv:1.6) Gecko/20040206 Firefox/0.8
Build Identifier: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US; rv:1.6) Gecko/20040206 Firefox/0.8

The following html works fine:-

<div id='helpcontent'>Help</div>
<script type="text/javascript">
<!--

var whichHelpPage="$helppage$";
opHtml="<font class='normal'><br>";

switch(whichHelpPage) {
        case "home":
                opHtml+="The Homepage consists of the following pages squeezed
into one easy to digest bite:-";
        break;
        default:
                opHtml+="The Homepage consists of the following pages squeezed
into one easy to digest bite:-";
        break;
}
opHtml+="</font><br><br>";
document.getElementById("helpcontent").innerHTML = opHtml;

// -->
</script>

But if you remove the initial content from the div at the top leaving

<div id='helpcontent'></div>

Then the getElementById("helpcontent").innerHTML method reports

document.getElementbyId("helpcontent") has no properties...

I /think/ this should be considered a bug and I've searched the lists of known
bugs but not come across this. Please forgive me for wasting your time if this
is one of those cases where IE is too forgiving and that this is correct behaviour!
Cheers!

Reproducible: Always
Steps to Reproduce:
1. Enter the html code in the details section above, try it - it works
2. Remove the initial content from the div and try again, it doesn't work..
3.

Actual Results:  
Firefox reports 
document.getElementbyId("helpcontent") has no properties...

Expected Results:  
It should have substituted in the variable I was passing in:-

document.getelementbyid("blah").innerHTML = htmlStuff

htmlStuff - into the DIV.

Comment 1

[Michiel van Leeuwen (email: mvl+moz@)]

*** This bug has been marked as a duplicate of 237536 ***