Is x a reserved keyword in Javascript FF/Safari not in IE?

Posted by Marco Demaio on Stack Overflow See other posts from Stack Overflow or by Marco Demaio
Published on 2010-03-22T19:20:11Z Indexed on 2010/03/22 19:31 UTC
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A web page of a web application was showing a strange error. I regressively removed all the HTML/CSS/JS code and arrived to the basic and simple code below.

<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.01 Transitional//EN" "http://www.w3.org/TR/html4/loose.dtd">
<html><head>
<title>test</title>

   <script type="text/javascript">
      var TestObj =
      {
         foo: function() {}
      }

      alert(x); //ok displays "undefined"
      var x = TestObj.foo;
      var z = TestObj.foo;
    </script>

</head><body>

   <p onclick='alert(x);'>Click shows function foo!</p>
   <img onclick='alert(x);' alt='CRAZY click displays a number in FF/Safari not function foo' src='' style='display: block; width: 100px; height: 100px; border: 1px solid #00ff00;'>
   <p onclick='alert(x);'>Click shows function foo!</p>

</body></html>

It's crazy: when clicking on P elements the string "function(){}" is displaied as expected. But when clicking on IMG element it shows a number as if x function got in some way removed from memory or deinstantiated (it does not even show x as "undefined" but as a number).

To let you test it quickly I placed the working test above also here.

This can be reproduced on both Firefox 3.6 and Safari 4.0.4.

Everything works properly only on IE7+.

I'm really clueless, I was wondering if x is maybe a reserved keyword in JS Firefox/Safari. Thanks to anyone who could help!

FYI:

  1. if you repalce x() with z() everything work prefectly in all browsers (this is even more crazy to me)
  2. adding a real image in src attribute does not fix the problem
  3. removing style in img does not fix the problem (i gave style to image only to help you clicking on image thus you can see the imnage border)

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