Arguments

name (DOMString) required

The name of the attribute to remove.

Description

Remove an attribute with the specified name.

If the attribute has a specific default value in this document type, removing the attribute should replace it with the default value (as well as its corresponding namespaceURI, localName and prefix if applicable).

This method removes non-namespaced attributes; to remove a namespaced attribute, use the DOM 2 removeAttributeNS method instead.

Compatibility

In Internet Explorer, Firefox, Safari and Opera 9.5 when removing an attribute which has a specific default value in this document type (such as the shape attribute of an <a> element) the attribute is not replaced with the default (only Opera 9.0 gets this right).

In Internet Explorer in HTML, as with getAttribute, this method is mapped to properties, not attributes; so for some attributes you need to use the property name, such as className for a class attribute and htmlFor for a for attribute (see getAttribute for more details).

Additionally, in Internet Explorer in HTML using this method on a style attribute doesn't actually remove it; IE considers the value of a style attribute to be a style object, not a string, and using removeAttribute has the effect of resetting all the style properties to their default values, while retaining the object itself. Using this method on an attribute which IE considers to have a boolean true value (such as disabled, when defined) resets it to false, and using it on an attribute IE considers to be a number (such as tabindex) or a function (event-handling attributes such as onclick) has no effect at all.

Internet Explorer implements a second argument to removeAttribute, which is a case-sensitivity flag that can take the value 0 (case-insensitive) or 1 (default, case-sensitive). This argument works as expected in IE, and does not affect any other browser.

Internet Explorer also implements a return value, which should be boolean true or false according to whether the attribute was successfully removed. However in practise, it returns true whenever an attribute should have been removed, even if it actually wasn't (because of one of the value type caveats mentioned above).