jenkinsci/jenkins — pull request #1098 by anafke (2014-01-22 02:11:10+00:00)
Title: Fix IE8 NPE with respect to sortability

IE8 (and I assume other browsers that use a doctype pre-html5) interpret the span outside of the link, as in HTML4.01 you need the closing tag.
http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-html40/struct/global.html#h-7.5.4

The code was causing a NPE in IE8 and users could not sort the columns.

>> cell.innerHTML = ''+this.getInnerText(cell)+'';

>> cell.innerHTML ;
" S"

>> cell.innerHTML = ''+this.getInnerText(cell)+''

>> cell.innerHTML ;
" S"