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javascriptdom

Setting a property via property or setAttribute

Is one of these more preferable than the other? Why? How about performance--if these are being called thousands of times? 

A) element.setAttribute("disabled", true);
B) element.disabled = true;

They both seem to disable an input[text] element in FF 4.

Solution

  • In general…

    Use properties. For a long time (until version 7 or 8 IIRC) Internet Explorer had a seriously broken implementation of setAttribute that would set the property not the attribute (the classic point of failure was class since there is no class property (it is className).

    In this case in particular… element.setAttribute("disabled", true); is wrong. It should be element.setAttribute("disabled", "disabled");