AY-YI! IE!
Like, holy crap! IE, in it's infinite wisdom, decided that it would be fucking brilliant to transform html generated from an XSLT into its own format before returning it to you. This format isn't actually at all standards compliant anymore, and they tend to drop useful things... like EVERYTHING! It took me forever to debug.
Empty span tags were having their closing tag discarded at one point in IE's process, then added onto the end of everything at another point. Since I only added the spans as placeholders because IE is stupid, this is inconvenient. When I replaced the first of three placeholders, it nuked the rest of the doc (because the re-ordering of the span tags meant that they encapsulated each other... and everything else). The solution, add a bit of text in the placeholder, then it leaves the closing tag. Since the process happens nearly immediately, nobody will see it (and the year holder says "year", etc).
To top it off, if you add the text in the XSLT before the directive where you provide and id using XSLT attribute assignment, it ignores that assignment. Since I'm using the assignment to provide IDs to later access the placeholders, MY HEAD EXPLODES!
I mean, seriously, what sort of mentally deficient asshole designed that?
Anyway, I have it working properly. Firefox renders the javascript when I assign it. IE doesn't but what I wrote was something to search through what I was adding for chunks of javascript to run. It actually means I need a separate section in my AJAX stuff whenever I'm doing something IE-like, but I can live with that.
ramou