After working on a small AJAX library, I decided to test it in IE. Everything worked great, except when requesting XML. The responseXML property of the XHR was null. I’ve had this issue in the past where the server isn’t returning the appropriate Content-Type (text/xml). But that wasn’t the issue this time. I checked my resin config and everything was correct.
So, I uploaded to a remote server and tried again. Blammo. Chit just worked the way it was supposed to. This left me scratching my head however.
I installed Charles (www.charlesproxy.com), which is a great debugging HTTP proxy/monitor, to see what was going on. Everything worked as it should in FireFox, but still no dice in IE.
Then I noticed that traffic wasn’t being captured for Localhost when using IE. After a bit of stumbling around the net I found that if you add a period right after localhost, Charles will capture the traffic.
http://localhost:8080/ajaxTest.html
becomes:
http://localhost.:8080/ajaxTest.html
When I reloaded the page, I got a very nice surprise. Not only did Charles capture the traffic, but the XHR returned with a proper responseXML property!
I’m no network engineer, so I’m not even going to try and guess as to WTF. But, I’m happy it works as expected and thought I’d post about it in case someone else ever runs into this issue.
