Question

I have the following XHTML:

<span id='myid' cus:att='myvalue' xmlns:cus='http://mycompany.com/customnamespace'> </span> 

Is it possible to access custom attributes with javascript? I have the element that represents the span. Doing myElement.att doesn’t work, and I can’t figure out how to specify the namespace?

Answer 1

There is a special version of the getAttribute method specifically designed for accessing namespaced attributes: getAttributeNS. With your example XHTML, the following JavaScript code:

document.getElementById('myid').getAttributeNS('http://mycompany.com/customnamespace', 'att'); 

…would return ‘myvalue‘.

You can read more about the getAttributeNS method here.

Steve