String Theory
A string walks into a bar with a few friends and orders a beer. The bartender says, "I'm sorry, but we don't serve strings here." The string walks away a little upset and sits down with his friends. A few minutes later he goes back to the bar and orders a beer. The bartender, looking a little exasperated, says, "I'm sorry, we don't serve strings here."

So the string goes back to his table. Then he gets an idea. He ties himself in a loop and messes up the top of his hair. Then he walks back up to the bar and orders a beer.

The bartender squints at him and says, "Hey, aren't you a string?"

And the string says, "Nope, I'm a frayed knot."

about:blank and secure sites
Sometimes when you get a script that writes new content to the window, they use var winPop = window.open("about:blank"); and it works all find and dandy on a regular http site. The common question I get is: "I have seen this work on my development server. I have a calendar function that uses about:blank, but when I run it on my secure site (https) it fails."

Well it is true, the secure setting throws a security warning when this happens. This is just one of those annoying security warnings you need to live with. Now lets look at what about:blank is. If you were to do a view source, you would see it is just two html tags. The opening html tag and the closing html tag.

Now what I tell people to do is create the same thing and name it myblank.html. Now add this file name where your function calls the about:blank and you should see your code should run. I have seen instances where this has not worked, but in 99% of the cases it does the job.

If you have other solutions, please tell me!

Eric Pascarello
Moderator of HTML/JavaScript at www.JavaRanch.com
Author of: JavaScript: Your Visual Blueprint for Dynamic Web Pages