Home/ Questions/Q 1092595
In Process

The Archive Base Latest Questions

Editorial Team
  • 0
Asked: 2026-05-16T23:42:24+00:00

I have a question on Javascript and DOM; shouldn’t the following code retrieve the

  • 0

I have a question on Javascript and DOM; shouldn’t the following code retrieve the three foo:bar elements in the body? The alert window displays zero. It doesn’t work in any browser I have (not even Chrome Canary). Thank you for helping, have a nice weekend.

<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Strict//EN"
"http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-strict.dtd">
<html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml" xmlns:foo="http://example.com">
    <head>
        <title>Hello!</title>

        <script type="text/javascript">
        function bodyLoad() {
            var extElements = document.getElementsByTagNameNS('http://example.com', 'bar');

            alert(extElements.length);
        }
        </script>
    </head>

    <body onload="bodyLoad();">
        <foo:bar>First Foo-Bar</foo:bar>
        <foo:bar>Second Foo-Bar</foo:bar>
        <foo:bar>Third Foo-Bar</foo:bar>
    </body>
</html>
Share

Leave an answer

You must login to add an answer.

Need An Account,

1 Answer

  1. Editorial Team

    You are likely serving the document with the wrong content type. The browser has to treat it as XML for namespaces to be recognized, so you need to use application/xhtml+xml or another XML content-type, and not text/html.

    As an aside, your Doctype is wrong. If you want to use a DTD, then you will need one that includes the elements you are using from the foo namespace. If you don’t, then just get rid of the Doctype — it has no bearing on rendering mode in XML documents (again, text/html documents are treated as tag soup, not XML).

    • 0