getAttributeNS (W3C DOM Core method)

Spec
Version Depr. Static
DOM2 No No
Browser support (more…)
IE7 FF1.5+ SA3+ OP9+
None Buggy Full Buggy
Returns
DOMString

Example

var language = document.documentElement.getAttributeNS
    ('http://www.w3.org/XML/1998/namespace', 'lang');

The example above retrieves the value of the lang attribute in the XML namespace of the documentElement, and saves it to the variable language.

On an RSS page the documentElement is the root rss element, so if it looked like this: 

<rss version="2.0" xml:lang="en-gb">

Then the language variable would have the value en-gb.

Arguments

namespace (DOMString) required

The namespaceURI of the attribute to retrieve. A value of null means no namespace.

name (DOMString) required

The localName of the attribute to retrieve.

Description

Get the value of an attribute with the specified name and namespace URI.

Unlike Element nodes, Attr nodes do not inherit a namespace from the element they're attached to — if an attribute does not have an explicitly defined namespace then it simply has no namespace. See Attr for more details.

Return value

The attribute value; if the attribute is not defined this method should return an empty string, however some browsers return null (see Compatibility notes above).

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
None None None Buggy Buggy Buggy Buggy Buggy Full Buggy Buggy

Internet Explorer doesn't implement this method (it returns undefined).

Opera returns null for attributes which are not defined, rather than an empty string.

Additionally, in Opera 9.0 attributes which are not explicitly defined but have a specific default value in this document type are matched if the namespace argument matches the default namespace.

Opera 9.0 returns an interpreted value for a style/html:style attribute, rather than the literal value. For example, this value in HTML: 

style="color:green;font-size:1.5em;position:fakevalue;left:.5ex;"

returns this value from getAttributeNS: 

color: #008000; font-size: 1.50em; left: 0.50ex;

You can see how several changes are evident — the color value has been interpreted to hexadecimal, the font-size and left values have been normalized with leading and trailing zeros, and the fake value (for which, read: value it doesn't understand) has been removed. A space has also been inserted after each colon and semi-colon. (Although Firefox does a similar interpretation for a value retrieved using getAttribute, it does not do this for getAttributeNS.)

In Safari 1.3 and 2 attributes inherit a namespace from their owning element, therefore this method matches attributes with no explicit namespace if the namespace argument matches the default. They also treat an xml:lang attribute as a lang attribute, and therefore match it only if the namespace argument is http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml (even when the document isn't any flavour of HTML). Other XML attributes which have no HTML analog (such as xml:space) are matched with their namespace correctly, but are also matched if the namespace argument is an empty string.

In Firefox and Opera an empty-string namespace is treated the same as a null namespace (ie. it's taken to mean no namespace, when it should be treated as a real namespace URI); only Safari 3 gets this right.

: Behavior in HTML

Since namespaces are an XML construct, it's only reasonable to judge the behavior of this method in terms of XML (either on HTML pages in XHTML mode1, or pure XML). The behavioral variations of browsers in HTML mode2 are documented here for interest and reference, but the support summary table above does not consider this behavior.

All supported browsers in HTML mode behave essentially the same as they do in XHTML mode, except that they don't recognise namespaces at all. (So Opera only matches either explicitly defined attributes in no namespace if the namespace argument is null or an empty string, or (in the case of Opera 9.0) attributes which are not explicitly defined but have a specific default value in this document type if the namespace argument matches the default namespace; Firefox only matches explicitly defined attributes in no namespace if the namespace argument is null or an empty string; Safari 3 only matches explicitly defined attributes in no namespace if the namespace argument is null; Safari 1.3 and 2 only match explicitly defined attributes without a namespace if the namespace argument matches the default.)

Footnotes

1 On XHTML pages served as application/xhtml+xml.

2 On XHTML or HTML pages served as text/html.

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Related reference material

  • Attr
    The Attr interface represents a single attribute of an Element node.
  • attributes
    An unordered list of all the effective attributes that apply to an element.
  • getAttribute
    Get the value of an attribute with the specified name.
  • hasAttribute
    Whether this element has an attribute with the specified name, or has a specific default value for that attribute in this document type.
  • hasAttributeNS
    Whether this element has an attribute with the specified local name and namespace URI, or has a specific default value for that attribute in this document type.
  • hasAttributes
    Whether an element has any attributes.
  • removeAttribute
    Remove an attribute with the specified name.
  • removeAttributeNS
    Remove an attribute with the specified name and namespace URI.
  • setAttribute
    Set a new attribute on this element, with the specified name and value.
  • setAttributeNS
    Set a new attribute on this element, with the specified local name, namespace URI and value.
  • Namespaces in XML

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