There are times when you wish to change the content in your application. Perhaps you have pulled new data from a data source, or the end user has done something that requires a change to the content. There are several ways to do this. In today’s post, I would like to focus on one simple way to achieve this functionality…innerHTML.
Now…disclaimer…innerHTML is not an official standard per the specs out there even though it is support by all the major browsers. There are other “official” ways to do this and I plan on exploring those in future posts. innerHTML was something that Microsoft came up with for IE and the other browsers decided to support it as well…everyone gets lucky once in a while (if you haven’t figured it out yet…not a fan of IE). Regardless of how we arrived to the functionality, it is an easy way to instantiate this functionality. So how does it work…?
[code lang=”html”]
<!– Div to hold example content –>
<div id="myDiv">
<p>This is the content within my div</p>
</div>
<!– Button to click to change content –>
<button id="btnChange" onclick="changeContent();">Change Content</button>
<script>
// Function that changes the div content using innerHTML
function changeContent(){
var myDiv = document.getElementById("myDiv");
myDiv.innerHTML = "Here is the new content!";
return false;
}
</script>
[/code]
If you try out the aforementioned code, you will see that changing content is extremely easy with innerHTML…just not a specification standard.
Happy Coding!
Clay Hess
