createAttribute (W3C DOM Core method)
| Version | Depr. | Static |
|---|---|---|
| DOM1 | No | No |
| IE6+ | FF1.5+ | SA1.3+ | OP9+ |
|---|---|---|---|
| Full | Full | Full | Full |
- Returns
Attr- Throws
INVALID_CHARACTER_ERR
Example
var attr = document.createAttribute('href');
attr.nodeValue = 'http://www.sitepoint.com/';
element.setAttributeNode(attr);The example above creates an
href attribute, assigns it the nodeValue
http://www.sitepoint.com/ and then adds it to an
element using setAttributeNode.
So if the element in question were an HTML anchor element, like this:
<a>SitePoint</a>
The operation above would result in this:
<a href="http://www.sitepoint.com/">SitePoint</a>
Arguments
- name (
DOMString) required The name of the attribute.
Description
Create an Attr node of the specified name.
The created
attribute can then be added to an Element using the
setAttributeNode method.
A value can
be assigned to it using the specialized value
property of Attr, or the more general nodeValue property of Node.
The value is not parsed, so any entity references or other markup will be
treated as literal text. To create an attribute containing entities the
specification suggests to create an Attr node with
appropriate Text and EntityReference nodes as children, then add it to an
element using setAttributeNode, however in
practise this rarely works (see Attr for details).
This method creates non-namespaced attributes; to create a
namespaced attribute, use the DOM 2 createAttributeNS
method instead.
Return value
The created attribute node,
with its nodeName set to the specified name,
its localName, prefix and namespaceURI
set to null (coming soon!), and an empty
string value
Compatibility
| Internet Explorer | Firefox | Safari | Opera | |||||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 5.5 | 6.0 | 7.0 | 1.5 | 2.0 | 3.0 | 1.3 | 2.0 | 3.0 | 9.0 | 9.5 |
| Partial | Full | Full | Full | Full | Full | Full | Full | Full | Full | Full |
Internet Explorer 5.5 in HTML doesn't implement this method (it returns undefined).
The following notes relate to additional functionality that's needed to make this method useful in practise, rather than being about the method itself; the support table above does not take account of these notes:
Opera 9.0 in pure XML (but not
XHTML mode1) parses entities when
setting the value or nodeValue of an attribute node.
In Safari 1.3 and 2 it's not possible to
set the value of a created attribute using the value property (the property is read-only;
however using the nodeValue property is
supported fine).
Footnotes
1 On XHTML pages served as
application/xhtml+xml.
User-contributed notes
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