Availability

DOM Level 1 Core

Inherits from/Overrides

Node Attr

Properties

readonly String name

The name of the attribute.

readonly Element ownerElement [DOM Level 2]

The Element object that contains this attribute, or null if the Attr object is not currently associated with any Element.

readonly boolean specified

true if the attribute was explicitly specified in the document source or set by a script. false if the attribute was not explicitly specified but a default value is specified in the document's DTD.

String value

The value of the attribute. When reading this property, the attribute value is returned as a string. When you set this property to a string, it automatically creates a Text node that contains the same text and makes that Text node the sole child of the Attr object.

Description

An Attr object represents an attribute of an Element node. Attr objects are associated with Element nodes but are not directly part of the document tree (and have a null parentNode property). You can obtain an Attr object through the attributes property of the Node interface or by calling the getAttributeNode( ) method of the Element interface.

Attr objects are nodes, and the value of an Attr is represented by the child nodes of the Attr node. In HTML documents, this is simply a single Text node. In XML documents, however, Attr nodes may have both Text and EntityReference children. The value property provides a shortcut for reading and writing the value of an attribute as a String.

In most cases, the easiest way to work with element attributes is with the getAttribute( ) and setAttribute( ) methods of the Element interface. These methods use strings for attribute names and values and avoid the use of Attr nodes altogether.

See Also

Element

Passed to

Element.removeAttributeNode( ), Element.setAttributeNode( ), Element.setAttributeNodeNS( )

Returned by

Document.createAttribute( ), Document.createAttributeNS( ), Element.getAttributeNode( ), Element.getAttributeNodeNS( ), Element.removeAttributeNode( ), Element.setAttributeNode( ), Element.setAttributeNodeNS( )