the weekly whinge

So the web is full of people asking about this symptom and I hit it myself. Seemingly randomly (but consistently) IE will complain about nonsecure items in the page, with this warning message:

 

The error message from IE7

The usual response to this is that you’re loading images (or other media) from a non-SSL connection (hence “non-secure” items); there are also some mentions of IE not being happy about IFRAMEs without SRC= attributes (the browser assigns “about:blank” as a default SRC, which – being non-secure – flips the error); however none of these things applied in my case.

 

I discovered that if I turned off javascript the error disappeared, which suggested my script was problematic, but I still couldn’t find anything in the scripts which was loading any non-secure items.

 

In the end after much messing around it turns out that the offending script was setting object.style.background to a relative path, eg 

myObj.style.background=”url(/images/mybackground.gif)”;

Even though this will correctly resolve to an https:// address (assuming the root of the document is https://) IE can’t figure this out and moans.

 

Simply adding the full path to the background solved my problem.

 

This doesn’t apply to CSS files setting backgrounds – you can happily have relative paths in these and all will be well. 

 

Of course I then wondered why I hadn’t found that on the web and figured you might be looking for it too – so here it is 🙂

Tags: error, fix, internet explorer, nonsecure items, warning.