This community-built FAQ covers the “Select and Modify Elements” exercise from the lesson “Javascript and the DOM”.
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Web Development
FAQs on the exercise Select and Modify Elements
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I don’t quite understand, we change an element in JS but in HTML it remain the same ?
html should be changed. Please post your html & js code, maybe that can help us identify the issue
document.querySelector('h1').innerHTML = "Most popular TV show searches in 2016"
document.getElementById('fourth').innerHTML = "Fourth element"`
Output
3. iPhone X
4. Fourth element
5. Meghan Markle
HTML
<li id="third">iPhone X</li>
<li id="fourth">Matt Lauer</li>
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You expect the content of the html file to be changed? That won’t happen, the output changes
JS can manipulate the output (when pages is loaded), it won’t change the html file
why would you expect the html file to be updated?
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Yeah, a bit confusing for me. I thought if output is changed HTML must be changed to.
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No, that is not the case.
A browser renders html (from top to bottom), which is why we put the <script></script> tags near the bottom.
So after the <body></body> is loaded, the script is read and the code executed. This will manipulate the rendered code.
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Why can’t we use document.h1.innerHTML='Most popular TV show searches in 2016'; instead of document.querySelector('h1').innerHTML='Most popular TV show searches in 2016'; ?
According to previous step, elements can be called and changed with innerHTML only and h1 is an element too. Am I missing something?
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yes, but document is an object containing certain methods like querySelector. h1 (and other elements) are not valid methods of the document object.
thankfully not, that would bloat document object massively, to include every element also as selector. Then is having methods to which you can pass arguments (querySelector method, 'h1' argument) is much cleaner and doesn’t violate DRY (don’t repeat yourself)
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By default, should you use ' ... ' or " ... " and why?
Remember that JavaScript modifies the DOM, not the HTML itself
These are both valid ways of writing strings. There isn’t actually a ‘preferred’ way, however, according to Google, '' should be used
Ordinary string literals are delimited with single quotes ( ' ), rather than double quotes ( " )
However, personally, I use double quotes, just because I prefer them. This will be the case for many JavaScript developers
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If querySelector() can access the elements such as tag, class or ID, why do we even need getElementByID() in the first place?
I tried both methods to access id #fourth and it works the same.
There are some good explanations on the matter, I would recommend reading them:
javascript - querySelector vs. getElementById - Stack Overflow
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Mate you are ■■■■■■ fantastic i am have been sat at my computer an hour wondering why the ■■■■ none of my code was working for this and OMG!!! I felt a right prat something so simple as I forgot to move my to the bottom of the ■■■■■■ page hahaha. Thank you
Edit ( I only used the work B,l,o,o,d,y, )
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Does every use of .getElementByClass require a place to show the change like “[0]”. Is there a way to create a catch all for every class with that name to change the element. It seems if you leave off the [0] it nulls the whole line.
for example, with code below, if I wanted every class ‘slytherin’ to say Salazar Slytherin this wont work, is there a way to change all the classes with 1 line?
document.getElementsByClassName(‘slytherin’).innerHTML = ‘Salazar Slytherin’;
I don’t think that’s possible to do with just one line in that way.
I guess you could do a loop.
for (let element of document.getElementsByClassName('slytherin')) {
element.innerHTML = 'Salazar Slytherin';
}
1 Like
That makes sense, thanks.
I understood why it wouldn’t work for .getElementById because id’s are for 1 element. I thought there would be a simple way for .getElementsByClassName
Thanks
