Internet Explorer cannot open the Internet site. Operation aborted.

Recently, I have been playing with some map technologies, which I am trying to integrate with a wiki for some fun. Nothing out yet. But upon testing, I found this rather malicious nuisance that bugged me for hours yesterday.

I am using Virtual Earth APIs to do this job. The code is basically loading the map information, then paste a layer of pushpins onto the map. And this piece of code below :

<script>

/* a set of includes ... */

var map = null;
function AddMap()
{
map = new VEMap();
map.LoadMap();
}

function AddLayer()
{
var layer = new VELayerSpecification();
layer.Type = VELayerType.GeoRSS;
layer.ID = 'Foobar';
layer.LayerSource = 'mapdata.xml';
layer.Method = 'get';
map.AddLayer(layer);
}

function OnPageLoad()
{
AddMap();
alert('Added map');
AddLayer();
alert('Added layer');
}
</script>
<script>OnPageLoad()</script>

Well, nothing fancy than just sample code. Assuming my website is "http://www.website.com", when placed in the div tags, it is rumored to cause IE to throw an exception : "Internet Explorer cannot open the Internet site http://www.website.com . Operation aborted." This code works fine in Firefox, but truly not in IE. ( There were some that worked, but truly this is a problem that exists out there. ) After some googling, it seems to be some sort of IE implementation that causes this. The suggested workaround at Ryan Grant's blog was to make it an onload script. Which makes the calling :

<script>OnPageLoad()</script>

to be changed into :

<script>window.onload = OnPageLoad;</script>

Sure, it works. But at the code stopped its control flow after adding loading the map, without reaching "alert('Added Map');". I do not know how this happened and how to even google this problem ( well... "javascript" + "control flow" ? nothing really came out ). This creates a problem, it actually caused my layer script to stop function.

The workaround, by using defer script :

Change

<script>window.onload = OnPageLoad;</script>

into

<script>
if ( window.attachEvent )
{
window.attachEvent("onload", AddMap);
window.attachEvent("onload", AddLayer);
}
else
{
window.addeventListener("load", OnPageLoad, false);
}
</script>

If the script stops. No problem. We'll just do it one by one. This code works for me even when the javascript has been dynamically called and embedded between some div tags. I hope this makes the frustrated feels better.

References :
http://channel9.msdn.com/wiki/default.aspx/Channel9.InternetExplorerProgrammingBugs
http://www.viavirtualearth.com/wiki/DeferScript.ashx
http://ryangrant.net/archives/internet-explorer-cannot-open-the-internet-site-operation-aborted-google-map-api