Comment by aragonite | Hacker News Reader

Comment by aragonite | Hacker News Reader

What helps me make sense of it is that attributes in the narrowest sense are DOM nodes (Attr nodes). They can have properties (such as `name`, `value`, `ownerElement`, `prefix`), and collectively (as a NamedNodeMap, not an array) they can be accessed as the value of the `attributes` property of the element that owns them.

So in a sense the name of getAttribute(name) is misleading: it's probably better renamed getAttributeValue(name), because it doesn't really return an attribute (in the sense of an Attr node), but the value of the `value` property of the attribute node (owned by the element on which it is called) whose name is `name`.

See:

https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/API/Element/get...

https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/API/Element/get...

https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/API/Attr

That's all true, but is there anything practical you can do with an attribute node, and el.attributes, that you can't do with setAttribute/getAttribute/getAttributeNames/hasAttribute?

You can't even move attribute nodes between elements. You can't event reorder attribute nodes within an element.

Not that I know of! It's just a way to help myself keep the distinction straight mentally. If at the back of my head I always think of attributes as DOM nodes in their own right, I'm much less tempted to infer from a DOM element having a particular attribute to it possessing a particular property, and vice versa.

why do you care what order the attributes are in that you feel not being able to reorder them is a negative?

I don't. I was just trying to think of anything an iterable might offer over the other methods.

Work with attributes whose name doesn't match the XML Name production.

That can be a real concern in some cases (it came up recently in the context of "how do I move all the attributes on node A to node B, given that node A's attributes can be anything that can be created by the HTML parser?" c.f. https://software.hixie.ch/utilities/js/live-dom-viewer/?save... )

Hah, good insight! I didn't realise you could move attributes either. I tried, but seems (unlike nodes) you need to remove them before adding them.

Look at the DOM Attr interface [1].

You can list attributes, get their name, namespace, value.

[1] https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/API/Attr

All of which you can do with the other methods.

Sure

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