Mitch Labrador's Tech Blog Less is more when you are focused.

There is a bug in the jQuery validate plugin when running in internet explorer. When the validate function is called and errors are found, the invalid label error does not show, or rather it shows, it is just empty.

After considerable digging around  I found the culprit. jquery.Validate uses the function defaultMessage to determine which error message to display, it in turn calls the findDefined function to determine which of the parameters is defined and it uses that one as the message.

The bug is in findDefined function, it uses this line to determine weather to use that message or move to next one:

if (arguments[i] !== undefined) {

in internet explorer this comparison is incorrect. The correct comparison to get the desired behavior would be

if (arguments[i] != undefined) {

I’ve tested this last line in all the major browsers and it works great. Hopefully this will save you some time when debugging this particular problem.

Here is the fixed function:

findDefined: function() {

for (var i = 0; i < arguments.length; i++) {

if (arguments[i] != undefined) {

return arguments[i];

}