Question

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When to use setAttribute vs .attribute= in JavaScript?

Why do you sometimes set an attribute like this:

x.type = "submit"; 

and other times like this:

x.setAttribute("type", "submit");

I always figured it didn’t matter which way, but I’m having an issue doing this:

x.onClick = save;

but when I switch it to this it works:

x.setAttribute("onClick", "save()");

Answer 1

setAttribute only works on DOM elements and lowercases the attribute name on HTML elements. And you can’t use dot notation to assign values to dynamic attribute names.

And there’s also this:

Using setAttribute() to modify certain attributes, most notably value
in XUL, works inconsistently, as the attribute specifies the default
value. To access or modify the current values, you should use the
properties. For example, use elt.value instead of
elt.setAttribute('value', val).