AJAX links and innerHTML property of a select element strangeness

Figured i'd pass along the links as this is some very very cool stuff

(Keep in mind that this guy is aiming for .NET 1.1, all this stuff is more or less "built in" to the .NET 2.0 Framework)

AJAX WAS Here - Part 1 : Client Side Framework
AJAX Was Here - Part 2 : ASP.Net Integration

and referenced in the above (not so much, if any, .NET-related, but Callback related):
Ajax: A New Approach to Web Applications
Google Suggest
Google Suggest Dissected... (<<-- This guy spent a LOT of time with this)

This stuff is not rocket science but very functional. Because I do a lot of internal web app programming here at work its good to avoid postbacks as much as possible. Makes the app feel more responsive, more WinForm and SmartClient like... Happy reading...

Now for the strangeness...

While Doing some AJAX stuff, I have a client side javascript call to a server side ASP page which queries the SQL database with "for xml auto", returns XML and uses a XSLT stylesheet to format the results as elements to put into the innerHTML property of a select HTML element. All this server side stuff works nicely, its the client side stuff that is going nuts

Funny thing though in IE 6.x you can not set the innerHTML property, although the call works ok, the 1st [option value=" gets stripped out after its set so nothing appears in the select list. I tried many variations of this, the 1st tag always gets taken out of the resulting innerHTML property.

I thought this type of browser nonsense was behind us

BUG: Internet Explorer Fails to Set the innerHTML Property of the Select Object

Workaround, you have to set the entire [select name="blah"] then your [Option]'s (from the server call) and then the [/select] tags into the outerHTML property.