Javascript via showDocument no longer working

Question

A number of applets I have made execute javascript using the showDocument method as in the code snippet below. Now these applets were all working fine last week and now this week they have stopped working. I created a test applet just with a button on which executes the code below when clicked and this too does nothing, it doesn't even throw an exception.
Any ideas why I can no longer get this to work? I realise I can achieve Java to JavaScript communication via JSObject, but I'm trying to avoid that - and this solution seemed to work fine before. I'm running these applets in Internet Explorer 6.
Any help greatly appreciated.
    try {
      this.getAppletContext().showDocument(
          new URL("javascript:void(document.all['myField'].value='hello world')"), "_self");
    } catch (Exception exp) {
      System.out.println(exp.toString());
      exp.printStackTrace();
    }

Answer 1

Did you recently install any Windows updates? Cuz if so, it seems a recent IE security hotfix has broken this behaviour. It's not clear if this was intentionally done or if it's a side affect from something else. If it's intentional, my contention is this is a mistake. A javascript URL shouldn't be considered a violation of the standard security sandbox. The scripting engine already has it's own security to deal with bad Javascript.
Suffice it to say, you need to use JSObject.