I don’t know if this is a problem in other libraries, but I suspect it is. But I do know that it’s happened to me when using jQuery’s Ajax functions.

Why is this occurring?

I was tormenting myself with this same question on a client project, and discovered that although a bit of browser quirkiness was involved, it was actually an error on my part.

I hate it when it’s me.

As it turns out, I had an extra trailing comma at the end of the last element in my array. For example, in the following array:

{“gamesImDroolingFor”:[{"developer":"Blizzard","title:"Diablo III"},{"developer":"Square Enix","title":"Final Fantasy XIII"},]}

You’ll notice that there’s a comma after the last game’s bracket (which has been turned red for emphasis).

Firefox will ignore that comma, since clearly there’s no new object after it. Internet Explorer, the special child of the web, isn’t quite so bright, so it adds an extra, blank element to the array it creates.

Go IE.

The solution is easy, of course. Remove the unneeded comma.

I hope this helps prevent other developers from driving themselves batty trying to figure out what’s going wrong with their own arrays.

When it comes to web developers, it seems to be pretty much hate. Granted, I’m on that page, as I’ve spent more than a few hours of a client’s budget trying to get IE7 (let alone IE6) render a site properly. Or even close to properly. I’d say almost half of my posts so far at my Mindfly blog are a testament to this fact.

But there is a point where people get rabid. I explore that theme in this week’s comic.

I understand that crucifying Dean Hachamovitch (the dev team’s general manager and author of this heavily hated/loved IEBlog entry – and no, I can’t pronounce it) might be going a bit too far. For that matter, displaying Jeffrey Zeldman in a Pontius Pilate role might be taking metaphors to excess. But I can’t help but feel that when it comes to browsers, we’re so full of rhetoric that any actual message, be it pro or con, usually gets lost in the rabid barking. Ultimately, they’re not evil zealots, nor saints. They’re just guys making code. It just happens to be code for the most widely used browser on the web… which probably means they need more coffee breaks than most of us to stay calm.

In case it needs to be said, I’m not encouraging anyone being hung up on a cross. That’d be bad form.