25.4. Attr: an attribute of a document element DOM Level 1 Core: Node  Attr 25.4.1. Properties
readonly String name The name of the attribute.
readonly Element ownerElement [DOM Level 2] The Element object that contains this attribute, or null if the Attr object is not currently associated with any Element.
readonly boolean specified TRue if the attribute is explicitly specified in the document source or set by a script; false if the attribute is not explicitly specified but a default value is specified in the document's DTD.
String value The value of the attribute. When reading this property, the attribute value is returned as a string. When you set this property to a string, it automatically creates a Text node that contains the same text and makes that Text node the sole child of the Attr object. 25.4.2. Description An Attr object represents an attribute of an Element node. Attr objects are associated with Element nodes but are not directly part of the document tree (and have a null parentNode property). You can obtain an Attr object through the attributes property of the Node interface or by calling the getAttributeNode( ) or getAttributeNodeNS( ) methods of the Element interface. The value of an attribute is represented by the descendant nodes of an Attr node. In HTML documents, an Attr node always has a single Text node child, and the value property provides a shortcut for reading and writing the value of this child node. The XML grammar allows XML documents to have attributes that consist of Text nodes and EntityReference nodes, which is why an attribute value cannot be fully represented by a string. In practice, however, web browsers expand any entity references in XML attribute values and do not implement the EntityReference interface (which is not documented in this book). Therefore, in client-side JavaScript, the value property is all that is needed to read and write attribute values. Since attribute values can be completely represented by strings, it is not usually necessary to use the Attr interface at all. In most cases, the easiest way to work with attributes is with the Element.getAttribute( ) and Element.setAttribute( ) methods. These methods use strings for attribute values and avoid the use of Attr nodes altogether. 25.4.3. See Also Element | 