Custom HTML Tags using JavScript

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Custom Tags in HTML using JavaScript.

Browsers allow us to use a predefined set of HTML tags. There are times when we want to use our own tags in our html documents.

Custom tags in server side scripting

Server side scripting languages have the feature of adding our own tags to the server side scripts such as jsp. For example we use jsp tag libraries to achieve this in java. There is no big magic in this. The tag library actually prints a creates a HTMl code snippet for the given tags and replace the original html with these constructed HTML. The custm tag is converted to html before it is seen by the browser. But at the end the browsers see only predefined html tags.

Custom tag in JavaScript

Is it possible to make the browser react to a custom tag when it encounters such one in the DOM?

This is possible using JavaScript, when the browser encounters your custom tag, it can handl it like any other valid predefined tag.

Consider we have custom tag  <mytag id="mtag" txt="google"  url="http://www.google.com"> To go to google click </mytag>
we will let the browser process these tags as below

To go to google click google


A complete example is below.
<html>
<head>
  <script>
// function to trigger onload
  function p(){
   //document.createElement("mytag");
   var a =   document.getElementsByTagName("mytag");
   var obj = null;
   for(i=0;i<a.length;i++){
     obj = new mytag(a[i]);
    }
 }
//process custom tag mytag
  function mytag(c){
   var txt = null;
   var url = null;
   if(typeof c.attributes.type != null){
    for(k = 0; k < c.attributes.length; k++){
      var attrib = c.attributes[k];
          if(attrib.name == 'txt'){
         txt = attrib.value;
      }else if(attrib.name == 'url'){
         url = attrib.value;
      }//if
    } //for              
   }//if
   this.f = document.createElement('span');
   this.f.innerHTML = "<a href='"+url+"'>"+txt+"</a>";
   c.appendChild(this.f);
  }
</script>
</head>
<body onload="p()">
 <mytag id="mytag1" txt="google"  url="http://www.google.com"> To go to google click </mytag> <br/>
 <mytag id="mytag2" txt="yahoo" url="http://www.yahoo.com">To go to yahoo click </mytag>
</body>
</html>

Comments

  1. AnonymousDecember 6, 2011 at 9:33 PM

    Good post! Easy example!! Thanks!!!

    ReplyDelete
  2. AnonymousDecember 18, 2011 at 12:49 PM

    This method does not work in IE7 (line 29).

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Bala KJanuary 19, 2012 at 2:54 AM

      Known issue with IE, You may want to use as,
      <span><mytag txt="google" url="http://www.google.com"></mytag> </span>

      Now use  tag.parentNode.appendChild(t);  instead tag.appendChild(t);

      Delete

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