HTMLElement: anchorElement property

The anchorElement property of the {{domxref("HTMLElement")}} interface returns a reference to the element's anchor element. This works only in the case of elements associated with their anchors via the anchor HTML attribute, not elements associated with their anchors via the CSS {{cssxref("anchor-name")}} and {{cssxref("position-anchor")}} properties.

Value

An {{domxref("HTMLElement")}} instance representing the element's anchor element, or null if it doesn't have one.

Examples

Basic usage

This example associates an element with an anchor in HTML, and uses JavaScript to retrieve a reference to the anchor element.

HTML

In the HTML, we create a {{htmlelement("div")}} element with an id of example-anchor. This will be our anchor element. We then include another <div> with a class of infobox and an anchor attribute set to example-anchor. This designates the first <div> as the anchor of the second <div>, associating the two together.

We also include a {{htmlelement("p")}} element to output some results into.

html

<div class="anchor" id="example-anchor">⚓︎</div>

<div class="infobox" anchor="example-anchor">
  <p>This is an information box.</p>
</div>

<p class="output"></p>

JavaScript

We use JavaScript to get references to the positioned element and the output element, and then print the value of the positioned element's anchorElement property's associated id to the output, showing that the anchor element is the positioned element's anchorElement.

const posElem = document.querySelector(".infobox");
const outputElem = document.querySelector(".output");

try {
  outputElem.textContent = `The positioned element's anchor element is the ${posElem.anchorElement.id}.`;
} catch (e) {
  outputElem.textContent = `Your browser doesn't support the anchorElement property.`;
}

Result

The result is as follows.

Specifications

This attribute is not currently part of the HTML specification. Read the discussion about adding the anchorElement property at https://github.com/whatwg/html/pull/9144.