Question

Consider following DOM fragment:

<div id="div-1">foo</div>
<div id="div-2">bar</div>

Is it possible to insert HTML string (EDIT: that contains tags to render) between divs without wrapping it in another div (EDIT: or some other tag) created via document.createElement and setting its innerHTML property?

Answer 1

Most browsers support element#insertAdjacentHTML(), which finally became standard in the HTML5 specification. Unfortunately, Firefox 7 and lower don’t support it, but I managed to find a workaround that uses ranges to insert the HTML. I’ve adapted it below to work for your scenario:

var el = document.getElementById("div-2"),
    html = "<span>Some HTML <b>here</b></span>";

// Internet Explorer, Opera, Chrome, Firefox 8+ and Safari
if (el.insertAdjacentHTML)
    el.insertAdjacentHTML ("beforebegin", html);
else {
    var range = document.createRange();
    var frag = range.createContextualFragment(html);
    el.parentNode.insertBefore(frag, el);
}

Live example: http://jsfiddle.net/AndyE/jARTf/