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Editorial Team
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Asked: 2026-05-26T20:28:18+00:00

Why is the following code NOT working without id or name attribute specified for

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Why is the following code NOT working without id or name attribute specified for the anchor element?

<html>
<body>
<a href="#">First link</a>
<p>innerHTML of the first anchor: 

<script>document.write(document.anchors[0].innerHTML);</script>

</p>
</body>
</html>

But if I add an id (or name) attribute, like that:

<a id="first" href="#">First link</a>

It starts to work.

Why is id or name attribute so important? I don’t refer to it in my javascript code. I don’t use “getElementById” or anything, but it still wants an id to be specified.

P.S. I tested only in IE7 (not the best browser, but I don’t have access to anything better at the moment, and it can’t stop me from learning 🙂

UPDATE:

Thanks to Raynos who gave me an idea of HTMLCollection in his answer, I’ve gotten a deeper understanding of what’s going on here, by searching the web.

When we use document.anchors collection, we’re actually referring to a collection of a elements with the name attribute that makes an a element behave as an anchor, and not (only) as a link.

We don’t have to specify the name attribute if we want to refer to a elements as links. In this case we just need to use a different instance of HTMLCollection object which is document.links.

So the original code will work without name attribute if we modify it to:

document.write(document.links[0].innerHTML);

What a nice feeling of enlightenment! 🙂

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1 Answer

  1. Editorial Team

    WHATWG says:

    The anchors attribute must return an HTMLCollection rooted at the Document node, whose filter matches only a elements with name attributes.

    the document.anchors collection needs <a> elements with a name attribute.

    IE is known to have bugs where it treats id’s and name’s as the “same” thing. So that would probably explain why it works for <a> elements with an id attribute.

    As an aside, document.write and .innerHTML are evil.

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