Question

According to SitePoint (and my own experiments), the IE implementation of “setAttribute()” is buggy and unreliable.

Also according to SitePoint, the name attribute is read-only.

Is there another way I can set the name attributes on elements? I need this for use with radio buttons. If possible, I’d like a solution without jQuery, as I’m currently not using the library.

Thanks in advance!

Answer 1

Sitepoint liesis talking about a different usage of ‘name’ (see Anthony’s comment). It’s not read-only, it’s just there’s a long-standing IE bug (up to v7) where setting ‘name’ on form fields is only partially effective. Radio buttons in particular don’t accept it properly.

The Microsoft-endorsed solution, as detailed here is to use a horrific misfeature of IE’s version of the createElement call to set attributes at the same time:

var radio= document.createElement('<input type="radio" name="test" value="a" />');

Probably a better way would simply be to use good old innerHTML, eg.:

var div= document.createElement('div');
div.innerHTML= '<input type="radio" name="test" value="a" />';
var radio= div.firstChild;