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Editorial Team
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Asked: 2026-06-15T06:32:48+00:00

I just went through this MDN tutorial regarding the DOM. Under the final section

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I just went through this MDN tutorial regarding the DOM. Under the final section “Testing the DOM API” the following code is presented:

<html>
  <head>
    <title>DOM Tests</title>
    <script type="application/javascript">
    function setBodyAttr(attr,value){
    if (document.body) eval('document.body.'+attr+'="'+value+'"');
    else notSupported();
    }
    </script>
  </head>
  <body>
    <div style="margin: .5in; height: 400;">
      <p><b><tt>text</tt>color</b></p>
      <form>
        <select onChange="setBodyAttr('text',
        this.options[this.selectedIndex].value);">
          <option value="black">black
          <option value="darkblue">darkblue
        </select>
        <p><b><tt>bgColor</tt></b></p>
        <select onChange="setBodyAttr('bgColor',
        this.options[this.selectedIndex].value);">
          <option value="white">white
          <option value="lightgrey">gray
        </select>
        <p><b><tt>link</tt></b></p>
        <select onChange="setBodyAttr('link',
        this.options[this.selectedIndex].value);">
          <option value="blue">blue
          <option value="green">green
        </select>  <small>
        <a href="http://www.brownhen.com/dom_api_top.html" id="sample">
        (sample link)</a></small><br>
      </form>
      <form>
        <input type="button" value="version" onclick="ver()" />
      </form>
    </div>
  </body>
</html>

Everything works as expected, except for the link color: under Chrome a change in link color only gets applied once you change the text color (i.e., the first property). Shouldn’t all changes be immediate?

Thanks in advance.

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1 Answer

  1. Editorial Team

    That just isn’t the right way to change the color of links on a page (should be done with CSS), and the body.link attribute was deprecated in HTML version 4 (http://www.w3schools.com/tags/att_body_link.asp). I can’t be 100% positive, but I would say the reason it doesn’t work is because Chrome is a modern browser adopting web standards – the body.link attribute is not a standard.

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