Example

var attr = document.documentElement.attributes.getNamedItem('xmlns');

The example above retrieves a node called xmlns, from the attributes collection of the documentElement. If it exists in the collection, the attr variable will be a reference to that node, otherwise it will be null.

That example could also be written using the array syntax:

var attr = document.documentElement.attributes['xmlns'];

However in some cases an implementation might not support that syntax (for example Safari 2 in HTML, and Internet Explorer in XML, do not support the shortcut key syntax for accessing members of the attributes collection).