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Editorial Team
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Asked: 2026-05-24T10:51:21+00:00

I’m trying to generate a link (a-element) with JavaScript, but it just doesn’t work.

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I’m trying to generate a link (a-element) with JavaScript, but it just doesn’t work. Even though I append the element to the body. Nothing is being displayed. I found various examples, but nothing seems to work.

function getLink(){
            var a = document.createElement('a');
            a.title = "text";
            a.innerHTML = a.title;
            a.href = "http://example.com";
            document.body.appendChild(a);
        }
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1 Answer

  1. Editorial Team

    Looking at the page you linked us to in comments:

    <body onload="getVideo"></body>

    getVideo is not a function call.

    Write:

    <body onload="getVideo()"></body>

    Notice how Vache posted a testcase containing the snippet you gave us, and was able to immediately prove that the function getVideo works. Then all it took was finding what other Javascript was involved, and that was just eight characters, leading to this solution. Basic debugging!

    Further thoughts collated from around the question:

    • innerText would be more appropriate than innerHTML; conceptually you’re defining what the user should see, not what markup should produce it. Because of this, innerText will also escape HTML entities for you.

    • getVideo is a poor name for a function that does not “get” anything at all.

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