Create an Element with Attributes using JavaScript

Create an Element with Attributes using JavaScript #

To create an element with attributes:

Use the document.createElement() method to create the element.
Use the setAttribute() method to add one or more attributes to the element.
Add the element to the page using the appendChild() method.

Here is the HTML for the examples in this article.

index.html

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<!DOCTYPE html>
<html lang="en">
  <head>
    <meta charset="UTF-8" />
  </head>

  <body>
    <div id="box"></div>

    <script src="index.js"></script>
  </body>
</html>

And here is the related JavaScript code.

index.js

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// ✅ Create element
const el = document.createElement('div');

// ✅ Set Attributes on Element
el.setAttribute('id', 'my-id');
el.setAttribute('title', 'my-title');
el.setAttribute('disabled', '');

// ✅ Set styles on Element
el.style.backgroundColor = 'salmon';
el.style.color = 'white';
el.style.width = '150px';
el.style.height = '150px';

// ✅ Add text content to element
el.textContent = 'Hello world';

// ✅ Or set the innerHTML of the element
// el.innerHTML = `<span>Hello world</span>`;

// ✅ add element to DOM
const box = document.getElementById('box');
box.appendChild(el);

We used the document.createElement method to create the element.

The only parameter we passed to the method is the type of element to be created (div in the example).

The createElement method returns the newly created element.

We used the setAttribute method to set multiple attributes on the element.

The setAttribute method takes 2 parameters:

name - the name of the attribute whose value is to be set.
value - the value to assign to the attribute.

Note that it's a best practice to set boolean attributes, such as disabled, to an empty string. As long as boolean attributes are set to any value, they take effect.

If the attribute already exists on the element, the value is updated, otherwise a new attribute is added with the specified name and value.

If you need to add styles to the element, use the style object instead.

Notice that multi-word style names are camel-cased when accessed on the style object.

You can use the textContent property to set the element's text content or the innerHTML property to set the element's inner HTML markup.

You shouldn't use the innerHTML property with user provided data without escaping it. This would leave your application open to cross-site scripting attacks.

You can use the appendChild method to add the element to the page.

The method adds a node to the end of the list of children of the element it was called on.

If I load the page from the example above, I can see that the attributes are applied on the element.

attributes applied successfully

Create an Element with Attributes using JavaScript

Create an Element with Attributes using JavaScript #

Borislav Hadzhiev