Thursday, May 25th, 2006
getAttribute href bug in DOM
Category: JavaScript, Programming
The href attribute is different to other element attributes in that the value set can be relative to the context of the page URL. The browser will look at the pages current URL and derive an absolute URL for the link. This is the root of the problem, some browsers return the text of the attribute and others return the derived absolute URL. The results also differ by the method you use to retrieve the href attribute.
He gives the results of a few tests he performed (with IE and Gecko) to see underwhat circumstances it would return the correct attribute text and when it would make it relative. He had made some comments about which way was the “more correct” way, but has since changed them (because of some comments) and noted that the way IE tends to handle it is incorrect.
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Chris: You spell like a programmer.
Yeah, I just stumbled across this on a recent project. Expecting the DOM to deliver the actual text of the attribute, I kept getting errors and scratching my head. Dig a little deeper and voila! It’s returning an absolute URL relative to the current page! Since I was concatenating the result with an absolute path, it was doubling up on me. All the while, I’m staring at the Gecko DOM reference going, “huh?”
Thanks for the link… now I know what to expect from which browser. One more cheatsheet for my arsenal.
Yeah, i actaully spend some time staring at it too. If you want to do tag replacing, and need that relative path you better use title attribute.
Doesn’t seem like a bug to me. Isn’t that what linkobj.pathname, linkobj.search, and linkobj.hash are for? One more inconsistency…