Changing text between <div>'s

[Ton den Hartog]

Stupid basic question but I find it horribly imposible to find the answer
elsewhere... :-(

I want to have a piece of text in my HTML page and want to be able to change
it in a Javascript function that is called from a button. I think I can use
a

<div id="t"></div>

for this ? Something like

document.t.value="Hello"

should change it into

<div id="t">Hello</div>

I am getting fucking mad at finding these simple things.... Is there a good
intro somewhere ? My thick Oreilly JS book is just too busy with the
complicated stuff somehow :-((

Ton

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[Lasse Reichstein Nielsen]

ji*@jibbering.com (Jim Ley) writes:

The same would be true of .chicken or a read only innerHTML that
resulted in no change afterwards. What we want to know is if our
content ended up on the page.

Ah, Doh. *slaps forehead*. Yes, simply testing that you can write
to it, is not sufficient.

You assume that the HTML is normalized when passed through innerHTML.
That is a fair assumption, and correct for the current browsers.

Another method could be to create an element with an id, and then check
whether it becomes part of the document with document.getElementById
(or fallbacks, e.g., document.all, as usual).
/L
--
Lasse Reichstein Nielsen - lr*@hotpop.com
DHTML Death Colors: <URL:http://www.infimum.dk/HTML/rasterTriangleDOM.html>
'Faith without judgement merely degrades the spirit divine.'

[HikksNotAtHome]

In article <3f*************@news.cis.dfn.de>, ji*@jibbering.com (Jim Ley)
writes:

I was relying on the fact it would be a normalised source, so by
putting in mixed case element names, and extra whitespace in the
elements I was relying that if innerHTML wasn't known, then it would
be the same (it would just be a new property on the DOM element) but
it if it was known it was normalised away.

Just for my own curiosity, do you see any problems with the function I wrote to
check to see if it works?

function insertHTML(elem,newHTML){
tempVar = document.getElementById(elem).innerHTML;
document.getElementById(elem).innerHTML = newHTML;
if (tempVar == document.getElementById(elem).innerHTML) {alert('It failed')}
}

Maybe a different alert message (or another notifying mechanism). I left out
the object detection that should obviously go with it though.
--
Randy

[Lasse Reichstein Nielsen]

hi************@aol.com (HikksNotAtHome) writes:

Just for my own curiosity, do you see any problems with the function
I wrote to check to see if it works?
I can see the same problem he pointed out in my attempt :)
function insertHTML(elem,newHTML){
tempVar = document.getElementById(elem).innerHTML;
document.getElementById(elem).innerHTML = newHTML;
if (tempVar == document.getElementById(elem).innerHTML) {alert('It failed')}
}

Change "innerHTML" to "chicken" and it appears to work. That is, it only
tests whether there is a writeable property, not whether assigning to it
changes the document structure.
It would succeede in Netscape 4, if the getElementById had worked.

/L
--
Lasse Reichstein Nielsen - lr*@hotpop.com
DHTML Death Colors: <URL:http://www.infimum.dk/HTML/rasterTriangleDOM.html>
'Faith without judgement merely degrades the spirit divine.'

[Dr John Stockton]

JRS: In article <3f*************@news.cis.dfn.de>, seen in
news:comp.lang.javascript, Jim Ley <ji*@jibbering.com> posted at Sat, 3
Jan 2004 13:07:02 :-

On Sat, 03 Jan 2004 01:59:25 +0100, Lasse Reichstein Nielsen
<lr*@hotpop.com> wrote:

You can also (safely, I think) assume that a value gotten from the
innerHTML property can be put back in and give the same result.

The same would be true of .chicken or a read only innerHTML that
resulted in no change afterwards. What we want to know is if our
content ended up on the page.

We want to know if the previous visible content (if any) is removed, if
new content appears, and if new content looks as expected; or if an
error message appears.

We, as authors, can never know, since writing for an unknown browser is
a one-way process. Only if we can run the same version of the same
browser and test it ourselves can we really know.

Our code can never know all of the above; it cannot detect a fatal
error, it cannot read the screen, and it cannot detect a systematic
delusion that the required property is spelt InnerHTML.
ISTM that

<div ID=X><FONT color=red>NO GOOD</font></div>
That should read "All seems well", in lime.

<script ... >
DynWrite('X', '<FONT color=lime>All seems well</font>')

should enable the user to tell whether things are at least to some
extent working.

--
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[HikksNotAtHome]

In article <is**********@hotpop.com>, Lasse Reichstein Nielsen <lr*@hotpop.com>
writes:

Change "innerHTML" to "chicken" and it appears to work. That is, it only
tests whether there is a writeable property, not whether assigning to it
changes the document structure.
It would succeede in Netscape 4, if the getElementById had worked.

<sigh> CRAP! </sigh>

I knew I was missing something.........
--
Randy

[Dr John Stockton]

JRS: In article <20***************************@mb-m27.aol.com>, seen in
news:comp.lang.javascript, HikksNotAtHome <hi************@aol.com>
posted at Sat, 3 Jan 2004 18:59:07 :-

Just for my own curiosity, do you see any problems with the function I wrote to
check to see if it works?

function insertHTML(elem,newHTML){
tempVar = document.getElementById(elem).innerHTML;
document.getElementById(elem).innerHTML = newHTML;
if (tempVar == document.getElementById(elem).innerHTML) {alert('It failed')}
}

One needs also to check that it fails correctly!

Consider
insertHTML('F', 'OK')
insertHTML('F', 'OK')
The second one will report failure. A script could well have an error-
message Div, writing 'OK' or a fault-report to it for each iteration.

I get no alert on once executing a version of the above with innerHTML
changed to innnerHTML, which implies that the pre-existence of innerHTML
must be tested.

One might read the existing innerHTML, add a character to it, write it,
and read back; that seems OK even if innerHTML is undefined.

--
© John Stockton, Surrey, UK. ?@merlyn.demon.co.uk Turnpike v4.00 IE 4 ©
<URL:http://jibbering.com/faq/> Jim Ley's FAQ for news:comp.lang.javascript
<URL:http://www.merlyn.demon.co.uk/js-index.htm> jscr maths, dates, sources.
<URL:http://www.merlyn.demon.co.uk/> TP/BP/Delphi/jscr/&c, FAQ items, links.