Guess what? Another destruptive IE fallacy.

You have an input field in a form. A simple, linear text field.

You read the value of the input from a server side script… the script (yes, maybe wrongly) returns null when the string is empty (better: when there is a NULL field in the corresponding field of the database table).

So the code should be something like:

var field = getValueFromServer()
document.getElementById('theFormInputField').value = field

When the field is null, then, what you’d expect to see in the actual form field? In Firefox NOTHING. Null is null… null is nothing… NULL is not “NULL”!

In Internet Explorer what you see is a shiny… “null” string inside the field.

Now, think of a script that works with MANY of those server side set strings…