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Message-ID: <1963616.aqSPkdTlGX@PointedEars.de>
From: Thomas 'PointedEars' Lahn <PointedEars@web.de>
Reply-To: Thomas 'PointedEars' Lahn <cljs@PointedEars.de>
Organization: PointedEars Software (PES)
Date: Mon, 27 Feb 2012 17:40:40 +0100
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Subject: Re: How to programmatically display a value
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Erwin Moller wrote:

> On 2/25/2012 1:19 PM, Thomas 'PointedEars' Lahn wrote:
>> Cal Who wrote:
>>> I don't know if this is the "best" way to display a numeral but I found
>>> the innerHTML property on the span element and that appears to work OK.
>>
>> You are displaying a numeral, not parsing HTML markup; using innerHTML is
>> overkill, not standardized, and therefore error-prone.  Use the
>> `nodeValue' property of the `firstChild' of the span element object (you
>> should provide it with a child node, say<span>&nbsp;</span>).
> 
> Why did you say using innerHTML is error-prone?
> 
> Are you saying it is error-prone *because* it is not standardized?
> Or it it error-prone for a different reason?

Both.

> I ask because I never encountered any problems using innerHTML for
> simple tasks like displaying a number.

Because it is a simple task and it is only a number string, not markup, 
`innerHTML' is overkill.  It is also proprietary and error-prone.  
Therefore, it is best avoided here.

> What is it are you warning for here?

We really have discussed this ad nauseam here.  To reiterate: The 
`innerHTML' property facilitates only a proprietary de-/serialization of the 
document tree, entirely at the discretion of the implementor.  Among other 
things, this means that you can write to the `innerHTML' property but you 
cannot know if this worked.  There is no exception thrown and reading back 
the property value very likely yields a different string value than the one 
you previously wrote to it.  `innerHTML' breaks with tables, except when you 
generate the whole table with `innerHTML'.  `innerHTML' also (very 
obviously) is not supposed to work in XHTML.  All this is very different 
with the standardized DOM manipulation methods.


PointedEars
-- 
Danny Goodman's books are out of date and teach practices that are
positively harmful for cross-browser scripting.
  -- Richard Cornford, cljs, <cife6q$253$1$8300dec7@news.demon.co.uk> (2004)