Question

If you removeProp on something you should have used removeAttr() on will it silently fail? Will it work? Will it actually remove the entire attribute or just the value inside it?

If checked is added using removeProp(), can it be removed with removeAttr()?

Many questions!

Answer 1

An attribute of an element is something like ‘class’. Whereas its property would be ‘className’.

This is the reason for adding jQuery.prop and jQuery.propHooks into version 1.6, to make it easier working with both.

So if the the property had the same name as the attribute you could use both removeProp or removeAttr.

I asked a similar question on jQuery forum, got this answer:

Yes, attr is meant for html attributes
as they are strictly defined. prop is
for properties. So for instance, say
you have a node elem with class
“something” (raw element not jQuery
object). elem.className is the
property, but is where the
attribute resides. Changing the class
attribute also changes the property
automatically and vise versa.
Currently, attr is jumbled and
confusing because it has tried to the
job of both functions and there are
many bugs because of that. The
introduction of jQuery.fn.prop will
solve several blockers, separate code
as it should have been separated from
the beginning, and give developers
faster functions to do what they
expect them to do. Let me make up a
percentage for a sec and say that from
my experience in the support IRC and
reading other’s code, 95% of the use
cases for attr will not have to switch
to prop.

EDIT

It may be best to stick to using either jQuery.attr or jQuery.prop. Theres seems to be some strange behaviour when setting and removing the checked attribute using both.

See here for an example: http://jsfiddle.net/tomgrohl/uTCJF/

There is a bug in 1.6 to do with selected: http://bugs.jquery.com/ticket/9079