It seems that Microsoft's brand new operating system, Windows Vista, introduced at least one interesting, not to say mysterious, phenomenon. It only arises when the user is trying to open a local HTML file with so-called "active content".

After some investigation we found out that it is problematic to open local HTML pages which reference non-existing JavaScript files. During development of qooxdoo applications this could be caused by renaming or moving a class without a re-execute of "make" to re-index the available classes (to regenerate the includer script).

Annoyingly, the displayed error is not very helpful. It just says "Invalid character" in line "0". No hint about security at all. All files are stored on the local file system. No "src" attribute uses another protocol like "http://"or an address of an (external) server. Just simple, relative paths. There seems to be no reason to interpret them the way IE7 under Vista does. The files do not access remote resources. They are not stored in other security zones. We really do not know what Internet Explorer "thinks" in this case.

In all other browsers a non-existing JS file is just ignored. No warning at the error console etc. (Ok, this could be improved here, too).

Please also take a look at the corresponding bug report. Any idea if this is a real IE7/Vista bug?