innerHTML and text normalization

http://www.quirksmode.org/bugreports/archives/2004/11/innerhtml_and_t.html

IE applies HTML normalization to the data that is assigned to the innerHTML property. This causes incorrect display of whitespace in elements that ought to preserve formatting, such as <pre> and <textarea>

Test page. Workaround is not included.


I've found out that setting outerHTML doesn't trigger normalization. So I've decided to test for .outerHTML property and if not false (i.e., IE), prepend and append the opening and closing pre tags to the content I want to set and assign that to outerHTML.

// Workaround for IE <PRE> innerHTML normalization quirk
if (elem.tagName == "PRE" && "outerHTML" in elem)
{
    elem.outerHTML = "<PRE>" + str + "</PRE>";
}
else
{
    elem.innerHTML = str;
}

(Works with IE & FF)