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I have the following XHTML:

<span id="myid" cus:att="myvalue" xmlns:cus="http://mycompany.com/customnamespace">
</span>

Is it possible to access custom attributes with javascript? I have the element that represents the span. Doing myElement.att doesn't work, and I can't figure out how to specify the namespace?

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4
  • You will need to specify whether the page is being served as text/html or application/xhtml+xml as the answer will be different.
    – Alohci
    Commented Mar 26, 2009 at 9:04
  • @Alohci, I'll still be interested in seeing both answers.
    – tpower
    Commented Mar 26, 2009 at 9:16
  • In text/html the namespace is an illusion and what you have is an attribute with a colon in its name. Annakata's answer works. In application/xhtml+xml the namespace is real. I haven't tested, but I expect you will need to getAttributeNS() to access the attribute.
    – Alohci
    Commented Mar 26, 2009 at 9:36
  • @Alochi, Thanks, that makes a lot of sense. Write that as an answer and it'll get a vote.
    – tpower
    Commented Mar 26, 2009 at 9:57

2 Answers 2

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5

Normally speaking you can access it directly, i.e. element.attribute but the namespace slightly complicates this to:

element.getAttribute("namespace:attribute") //the nuclear x-browser option

so just to be really really clear, that'll be something like:

document.getElementById('myid').getAttribute('cus:att')
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6
  • It works, but he has to get to the element before, which doesn't have an ID, nor class, nor name. Using DOM element as "global" isn't a good practice and you might get burned.
    – Bogdan Constantinescu
    Commented Mar 26, 2009 at 9:19
  • My problem wasn't getting the element but I will add the id to the question.
    – tpower
    Commented Mar 26, 2009 at 9:22
  • @Bogdan - I'm hardly suggesting he does any global anything, I'm just providing the general form under the (correct) assumption that the OP was capable of selecting the element already
    – annakata
    Commented Mar 26, 2009 at 9:30
  • @annakata Sure, I didn't say you were wrong, but right about now the answer is very good. +1 :)
    – Bogdan Constantinescu
    Commented Mar 26, 2009 at 9:39
  • I will accept this answer but there is one thing bugging me. To do this I need to know what alias the author chose for the namespace.
    – tpower
    Commented Mar 26, 2009 at 9:47
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There is a special version of the getAttribute method specifically designed for accessing namespaced attributes: getAttributeNS. With your example XHTML, the following JavaScript code:

document.getElementById("myid").getAttributeNS("http://mycompany.com/customnamespace", "att");

...would return "myvalue".

You can read more about the getAttributeNS method here.

Steve

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2
  • getAttributeNS is not supported by IE
    – annakata
    Commented Mar 26, 2009 at 12:20
  • Also won't work when the document is XHTML-served-as-HTML. It takes a proper XML parser to support namespaces.
    – bobince
    Commented Mar 26, 2009 at 16:42

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