Document: createElementNS() method

Baseline Widely available *

This feature is well established and works across many devices and browser versions. It’s been available across browsers since July 2015.

* Some parts of this feature may have varying levels of support.

Creates an element with the specified namespace URI and qualified name.

To create an element without specifying a namespace URI, use the createElement() method.

Syntax

js
createElementNS(namespaceURI, qualifiedName)
createElementNS(namespaceURI, qualifiedName, options)

Parameters

namespaceURI

A string that specifies the namespaceURI to associate with the element. Some important namespace URIs are:

HTML

http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml

SVG

http://www.w3.org/2000/svg

MathML

http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML

qualifiedName

A string that specifies the type of element to be created. The nodeName property of the created element is initialized with the value of qualifiedName.

options Optional

An optional ElementCreationOptions object containing a single property named is, whose value is the tag name for a custom element previously defined using customElements.define(). For backwards compatibility with previous versions of the Custom Elements specification, some browsers will allow you to pass a string here instead of an object, where the string's value is the custom element's tag name. See Extending native HTML elements for more information on how to use this parameter.

The new element will be given an is attribute whose value is the custom element's tag name. Custom elements are an experimental feature only available in some browsers.

Return value

The new Element.

Exceptions

NamespaceError DOMException

Thrown if the namespaceURI value is not a valid namespace URI.

InvalidCharacterError DOMException

Thrown if the qualifiedName value is not a valid XML name; for example, it starts with a number, hyphen, or period, or contains characters other than alphanumeric characters, underscores, hyphens, or periods.

Examples

This creates a new <div> element in the XHTML namespace and appends it to the vbox element. Although this is not an extremely useful XUL document, it does demonstrate the use of elements from two different namespaces within a single document:

xml
<?xml version="1.0"?>
<page xmlns="http://www.mozilla.org/keymaster/gatekeeper/there.is.only.xul"
      xmlns:html="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml"
      title="||Working with elements||"
      onload="init()">

<script type="application/javascript"><![CDATA[
 let container;
 let newDiv;
 let textNode;

 function init(){
   container = document.getElementById("ContainerBox");
   newDiv = document.createElementNS("http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml", "div");
   textNode = document.createTextNode("This is text that was constructed dynamically with createElementNS and createTextNode then inserted into the document using appendChild.");
   newDiv.appendChild(textNode);
   container.appendChild(newDiv);
 }

]]></script>

 <vbox id="ContainerBox" flex="1">
  <html:div>
   The script on this page will add dynamic content below:
  </html:div>
 </vbox>

</page>

Note: The example given above uses inline script which is not recommended in XHTML documents. This particular example is actually an XUL document with embedded XHTML, however, the recommendation still applies.

Specifications

Specification
DOM
# ref-for-dom-document-createelementns①

Browser compatibility

BCD tables only load in the browser

See also