JavaScript creating a new element

I’ve realized I’ve done quite a few articles already where I used the technique to create elements from scratch in Vanilla JavaScript.

But I’ve never actually gone through the basics of creating elements in JavaScript.

TLDR; You can use document.createElement() to create new elements.

Creating new elements in JavaScript permalink

When using the createElement() function you can pass the element you can to create, but you don’t need to pass in the brackets <>.

Some examples:

document.createElement('div');
document.createElement('aside');
document.createElement('custom');

Run this in JavaScript and it will create these three elements for you.

As you can see it allows known HTML element or even custom elements.

These however will not get added to the dom directly. We can console log them to see what’s happening.

Let’s create a full element and add it to the dom now.

let div = document.createElement('div');
div.textContent = `I'm created`;
div.style.backgroundColor = 'red';
div.id = 'custom_id';

document.body.appendChild(div);

And this will actually append a red div to our dom. The red div will have a custom ID even.

Pretty cool right? You can try this out yourself in the following Codepen.

See the Pen JavaScript creating a new element by Chris Bongers (@rebelchris) on CodePen.

Thank you for reading, and let’s connect! permalink

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