If innerHTML is evil, then what's a better way change the text of a link?

Posted by sanj on Stack Overflow See other posts from Stack Overflow or by sanj
Published on 2008-12-27T14:40:35Z Indexed on 2010/03/08 11:06 UTC
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JavaScript

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dom

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innerhtml

I know innerHTML is supposedly evil, but I think it's the simplest way to change link text. For example:

<a id="mylink" href="">click me</a>

In JS you can change the text with:

document.getElementById("mylink").innerHTML = new_text;

And in Prototype/jQuery:

$("mylink").innerHTML = new_text;

works fine. Otherwise you have to replace all of the child nodes first and then add a text node. Why bother?

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