[Javascript] Wrestling with DOM access (artificial attributes, IE vs Firefox vs Safari)

[Roger Roelofs]

Charls,

On Aug 6, 2005, at 4:33 AM, Charles Albrecht wrote:

> An example of what I'm working with below is at:
>   http://euonymic.com/~charlesa/test/menu_test.html
>
> I'm trying to find a more browser-neutral way to access artificial
> attributes I've attached to blocks in my HTML than...
>
>   var node = document.getElementById("name");
>     oldvalue = node.artificialattribute   // IE, Safari
>     oldvalue = node.getAttributeNode("artificialattribute").value  //
> Firefox, Safari
>
>   var newvalue = oldvalue;
>     node.artificialattribute = value;  // IE, Safari
>     node.setAttribute("artificialattribute", value);  // Firefox, 
> Safari
>
> In my case, the element I'm looking at is something like:
>
> <tr id="row512" level="2" hidecount="0" expanded="true">  [1]
>
> Now, I'm not particularly attached to leaving these in the HTML.
> (hidecount and expanded merely store state and start with default
> values anyway. level's more difficult, because I still need it in the
> generated source somewhere.) Actually, I'd probably prefer to get them
> out of the tag attributes so the page will come closer to validating
> against its doctype.

A sample page would help us give more 'context-sensitive' help, but I 
often abuse the class attribute for this kind of stuff.  The class 
attribute is a space delimited _list_ of values, so you could have 
something like

<tr id="row512" class="level2 hidecount0 expanded">

var rowEl = document.getElementById("row512");
var aState = rowEl.className.split(" ");
...

One advantage of this approach is that I almost never write
rowEl.style.display = "none";  because that stuff all ends up in the 
css with class selectors.

hth
Roger,

Roger Roelofs
Know what you value.