Buggy Browser

July 14, 2005 7:05 PM

"Handler could not be removed". Huh? Help!

Everytime I go to Wikipedia (and I go there a lot) I get an Internet Explorer script alert message that says "handler could not be removed". Any link in Wikipedia also brings up the message. Clicking 'ok' makes it go away, but again, if I click any internal link I get the message again.

If I go to IE preferences and 'unclick' enable scripting, I don't get the message, but obviously, that impacts other sites I might visit too.

I reinstalled IE once. Didn't fix it. It's only the wikipedia site as far as I can tell.

I am using Internet Explorer 5.2.3 on my Mac with OSx 10.4.2.

Any suggestions to fix this odd bug?

(p.s. I know i should use Safari and Firefox, and I do sometimes! It's just that for some reason, I prefer IE for my day to day browsing)

posted by extrabox to Computers & Internet (4 answers total)

Best answer: Not your browser, just some wonky javascript:


function addEvent(elm, evType, fn, useCapture)
// addEvent and removeEvent
// cross-browser event handling for IE5+, NS6 and Mozilla
// By Scott Andrew
{
if (elm.addEventListener){
elm.addEventListener(evType, fn, useCapture);
return true;
} else if (elm.attachEvent){
var r = elm.attachEvent("on"+evType, fn);
return r;
} else {
alert("Handler could not be removed");
}
}


It checks for a couple of event-binding methods and if they're not available in your browser (they're not in IE Mac), it pops the alert message. Replacing the alert with old-school bracket notation event binding ought to fix it:


elm['on'+evType]=fn;


Drop them a note, they might not know there's a problem.
posted by nikzhowz at 7:41 PM on July 14, 2005

Response by poster: Thank you, I dropped them a note as you suggested.
posted by extrabox at 8:37 PM on July 14, 2005

On a side note, you may want to get used to this; IE5 for the Mac was wonderful when it was brand-new (it was the first browser to support all of CSS1), but now it's an old, unmaintained clunker of a browser that web designers increasingly don't feel obligated to support. Sooner or later you'll either have to switch to something more modern (in which case there would be no error because you'd have W3C DOM support) or resign yourself to sites which 'degrade' in your browser.
posted by ubernostrum at 9:42 PM on July 14, 2005

Response by poster: Bugzilla at Wikipedia already got back to me...they fixed the bug. It works now! Thanks again!
posted by extrabox at 9:42 PM on July 14, 2005