What is the difference between attribute and property?

properties modeling
caustic picture caustic · Nov 3, 2008 · Viewed 117.6k times · Source

These seem to mean the same thing. But what term is more appropriate in what context?

Answer

Alnitak picture Alnitak · May 20, 2012

In general terms (and in normal English usage) the terms mean the same thing.

In the specific context of HTML / Javascript the terms get confused because the HTML representation of a DOM element has attributes (that being the term used in XML for the key/value pairs contained within a tag) but when represented as a JavaScript object those attributes appear as object properties.

To further confuse things, changes to the properties will typically update the attributes.

For example, changing the element.href property will update the href attribute on the element, and that'll be reflected in a call to element.getAttribute('href').

However if you subsequently read that property, it will have been normalised to an absolute URL, even though the attribute might be a relative URL!

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