Calling alerts with ExternalInterface

My ominous prediction came true - Internet Explorer is refusing to cooperate.

On the plus side, I found out that you can do Javascript alerts without defining any functions on your html page.

I attached this code to a button:

ExternalInterface.call('alert','Work darnit!');

and it actually worked (on both IE and Firefox). Which was nice.

Which means that the External Interface call does work on IE, but I don't know why the whole thing is not working.