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Comment by jaffathecake | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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.

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

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.

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