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JavaScript JavaScript and the DOM (Retiring) Making Changes to the DOM Changing Element Attributes

Posted by Benjamin Hedgepeth
Benjamin Hedgepeth
5,672 Points

There's no documentation on Element.attribute

Upon researching on how to retrieve the value of an attribute attached to an element, I can't necessarily find element.attribute documentation , however, element.attributes is returned in a search.

Thus I have to ask, is this property even used in production? I can't find the property under the Elements interface in MDN. Are setAttribute() & getAttribute() more commonly used?

1 Answer

Steven Parker
Steven Parker
231,271 Points
Steven Parker
Steven Parker
231,271 Points

No, I don't think elements have an "attribute" property.

But some attributes can be accessed just by name. For example, if you had an element referenced by a variable named "test", you could access its id attribute with: "test.id". Some attributes can be accessed by other names, like you could see the class settings with "test.className".

If you're not sure if an attribute has direct access, you can use attributes or the getAttribute() method. For example, these are all ways to get the value of the title attribute of an element referenced by the variable "test":

titleValue = test.title;     // note: this only works for a few attributes
titleValue = test["title"];  // same here
titleValue = test.attributes.title.value;
titleValue = test.getAttribute("title");

And here is the MDN documentation for the "attributes" property.