JQuery html() vs. innerHTML

javascript jquery html dom innerhtml
Bhupi picture Bhupi · Aug 25, 2010 · Viewed 173.9k times · Source

Can I completely rely upon jQuery's html() method behaving identical to innerHTML? Is there any difference between innerHTML and jQuery's html() method? If these methods both do the same, can I use jQuery's html() method in place of innerHTML?

My problem is: I am working on already designed pages, the pages contains tables and in JavaScript the innerHTML property is being used to populate them dynamically.

The application is working fine on Firefox but Internet Explorer fires an error: unknown runtime exception. I used jQuery's html() method and IE's error has disappeared. But I'm not sure it will work for all browsers and I'm not sure whether to replace all innerHTML properties with jQuery's html() method.

Thanks a lot.

Answer

jAndy picture jAndy · Aug 25, 2010

To answer your question:

.html() will just call .innerHTML after doing some checks for nodeTypes and stuff. It also uses a try/catch block where it tries to use innerHTML first and if that fails, it'll fallback gracefully to jQuery's .empty() + append()

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