Home/ Questions/Q 781471
In Process

The Archive Base Latest Questions

Editorial Team
  • 0
Asked: 2026-05-14T20:14:05+00:00

I’m trying to set the onclick attribute of a link generated with jQuery. While

  • 0

I’m trying to set the “onclick” attribute of a link generated with jQuery.

While other attributes work without problem (eg. href, but also other custom attrs), setting “onclick” seems to only work in FireFox. On other browsers the attribute just gets ignored.

Any hint? Is this behaviour correct? And why?

<html><head>
<script type="text/javascript" src="http://ajax.googleapis.com/ajax/libs/jquery/1.4.2/jquery.min.js"></script>
<script type="text/javascript">
  jQuery(function(){
    var obj = $('<a/>');
    obj.html('click me');
    obj.attr({'href':'#test', 'onclick':'alert("o hai"); return false;'});
    $('body').append(obj);
  });
</script>
</head><body /></html>

EDIT: I know about the .click() jQuery method; but that’s not the point, I just want to set the attribute and can’t figure out why it doesn’t work like any other attr does.

Share

Leave an answer

You must login to add an answer.

Need An Account,

1 Answer

  1. Editorial Team

    Is this behaviour correct?

    In as much as attr('onsomeevent', ...) has never been the way to add event listeners, has never been supported, and only works on Firefox due to coincidence, yes.

    And why?

    Because IE before version 8 can’t directly get/set HTML attributes. Calling setAttribute() only sets a DOM property of the same name. And the onclick property isn’t a string property so you can’t write a string to it. It only accepts a function value.

    jQuery’s attr() muddies the issue by being called attr but actually writing to DOM properties and not HTML attributes… but using HTML attribute names (like eg. class) rather than DOM property names (like className).

    (Except when it doesn’t, because for some cases it tries to hide the difference by using attributes. Except that still doesn’t work all the time in IE for the reason above. This is not one of jQuery’s proudest moments.)

    Anyhow, in general having JavaScript in a string is a code smell. The best way forward for jQuery and modern JavaScript in general is to use function objects (possibly inline function() { ... } expressions) instead.

    • 0