HTMLElement: anchorElement property

Non-standard: This feature is not standardized. We do not recommend using non-standard features in production, as they have limited browser support, and may change or be removed. However, they can be a suitable alternative in specific cases where no standard option exists.

Experimental: This is an experimental technology
Check the Browser compatibility table carefully before using this in production.

The anchorElement property of the 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 anchor-name and position-anchor properties.

Value

An 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

element with an id of example-anchor. This will be our anchor element. We then include another

with a class of infobox and an anchor attribute set to example-anchor. This designates the first

as the anchor of the second

, associating the two together.

We also include a

element to output some results into.

html

⚓︎


  This is an information box.

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.