This document describes the Internet Explorer (IE) idiosyncrasies when dealing with custom HTML attributes and tags. Read this document if you are planning on deploying your Angular application on IE8 or earlier.
The project currently supports and will attempt to fix bugs for IE9 and above. The continuous integration server runs all the tests against IE9, IE10, and IE11. See Travis CI and ci.angularjs.org.
We do not run tests on IE8 and below. A subset of the AngularJS functionality may work on these browsers, but it is up to you to test and decide whether it works for your particular app.
To make your Angular application work on IE please make sure that:
You polyfill JSON.stringify for IE7 and below. You can use JSON2 or JSON3 polyfills for this.
<!doctype html>
<html xmlns:ng="http://angularjs.org">
<head>
<!--[if lte IE 7]>
<script src="/path/to/json2.js"></script>
<![endif]-->
</head>
<body>
...
</body>
</html>
add id="ng-app"
to the root element in conjunction with ng-app
attribute
<!doctype html>
<html xmlns:ng="http://angularjs.org" id="ng-app" ng-app="optionalModuleName">
...
</html>
you do not use custom element tags such as <ng:view>
(use the attribute version
<div ng-view>
instead), or
if you do use custom element tags, then you must take these steps to make IE 8 and below happy:
<!doctype html>
<html xmlns:ng="http://angularjs.org" id="ng-app" ng-app="optionalModuleName">
<head>
<!--[if lte IE 8]>
<script>
document.createElement('ng-include');
document.createElement('ng-pluralize');
document.createElement('ng-view');
// Optionally these for CSS
document.createElement('ng:include');
document.createElement('ng:pluralize');
document.createElement('ng:view');
</script>
<![endif]-->
</head>
<body>
...
</body>
</html>
ng-style
tags instead of style="{{ someCss }}"
. The later works in Chrome and Firefox
but does not work in Internet Explorer <= 11 (the most recent version at time of writing).The important parts are:
xmlns:ng
- namespace - you need one namespace for each custom tag you are planning on
using.
document.createElement(yourTagName)
- creation of custom tag names - Since this is an
issue only for older version of IE you need to load it conditionally. For each tag which does
not have namespace and which is not defined in HTML you need to pre-declare it to make IE
happy.
IE has issues with element tag names which are not standard HTML tag names. These fall into two categories, and each category has its own fix.
If the tag name starts with my:
prefix then it is considered an XML namespace and must
have corresponding namespace declaration on <html xmlns:my="ignored">
If the tag has no :
but it is not a standard HTML tag, then it must be pre-created using
document.createElement('my-tag')
If you are planning on styling the custom tag with CSS selectors, then it must be
pre-created using document.createElement('my-tag')
regardless of XML namespace.
The good news is that these restrictions only apply to element tag names, and not to element
attribute names. So this requires no special handling in IE: <div my-tag your:tag></div>
.
Suppose you have HTML with unknown tag mytag
(this could also be my:tag
or my-tag
with same
result):
<html>
<body>
<mytag>some text</mytag>
</body>
</html>
It should parse into the following DOM:
#document
+- HTML
+- BODY
+- mytag
+- #text: some text
The expected behavior is that the BODY
element has a child element mytag
, which in turn has
the text some text
.
But this is not what IE does (if the above fixes are not included):
#document
+- HTML
+- BODY
+- mytag
+- #text: some text
+- /mytag
In IE, the behavior is that the BODY
element has three children:
A self closing mytag
. Example of self closing tag is <br/>
. The trailing /
is optional,
but the <br>
tag is not allowed to have any children, and browsers consider <br>some
text</br>
as three siblings not a <br>
with some text
as child.
A text node with some text
. This should have been a child of mytag
above, not a sibling.
A corrupt self closing /mytag
. This is corrupt since element names are not allowed to have
the /
character. Furthermore this closing element should not be part of the DOM since it is
only used to delineate the structure of the DOM.
To make CSS selectors work with custom elements, the custom element name must be pre-created with
document.createElement('my-tag')
regardless of XML namespace.
<html xmlns:ng="needed for ng: namespace">
<head>
<!--[if lte IE 8]>
<script>
// needed to make ng-include parse properly
document.createElement('ng-include');
// needed to enable CSS reference
document.createElement('ng:view');
</script>
<![endif]-->
<style>
ng\:view {
display: block;
border: 1px solid red;
}
ng-include {
display: block;
border: 1px solid blue;
}
</style>
</head>
<body>
<ng:view></ng:view>
<ng-include></ng-include>
...
</body>
</html>