createElement (W3C DOM Core method)
| Version | Depr. | Static |
|---|---|---|
| DOM1 | No | No |
| IE5.5+ | FF1.5+ | SA3+ | OP9+ |
|---|---|---|---|
| Buggy | Full | Full | Full |
- Returns
Element- Throws
INVALID_CHARACTER_ERR
Example
var element = document.createElement('h1');
element.appendChild(document.createTextNode
('The man who mistook his wife for a hat'));The example above
creates an <h1> element, and then adds text to
it.
The end result of that operation would be this HTML:
<h1>The man who mistook his wife for a hat</h1>
Arguments
Description
Create an Element node of the specified type.
The created
element can then be added to the document using Node methods such as appendChild or insertBefore.
A created element implements
the Element interface as soon as it's created, so
attributes can be added to it immediately, without having to append it to
the document first. If the element has default attributes in this document
type, those attributes are automatically created and attached to the
element.
This method creates non-namespaced elements; to create a
namespaced element, use the DOM 2 createElementNS
method instead.
Return value
The created element node,
with its nodeName set to the specified tag
name, and its localName, prefix and namespaceURI
set to null
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 |
| Buggy | Buggy | Buggy | Full | Full | Full | Buggy | Buggy | Full | Full | Full |
Internet Explorer in HTML supports a corrupted syntax, that allows a subtree to be created by passing serialized markup to this method, for example:
document.createElement('<p>Oh dear...</p>');
This violates the specification because it should throw a DOMException (code 5: INVALID_CHARACTER_ERR),
therefore this behavior is considered a bug.
Nevertheless, given its extremely buggy support for setAttribute, this syntax may be the best way
of creating certain types of elements in Internet Explorer. See setAttribute for details.
Safari 1.3 and 2 in XHTML mode or XML1, while not actually supporting this corrupted syntax in full, don't throw an exception either — they return the entire input string as the node name of what appears to be a created element reference; but they haven't actually created an element, and cannot add the data to the page.
Footnotes
1 On XHTML pages served as
application/xhtml+xml.
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