I've been working with some data attributes in Javascript recently. I have been using element.dataset.foo = "bar" and element.setAttribute("data-foo","bar") interchangeably. I've heard that generally setAttribute is more reliable and that using an attribute is faster, but is that still the case with these somewhat nonstandard attributes?

I've been working with some data attributes in Javascript recently. I have been using element.dataset.foo = "bar" and element.setAttribute("data-foo","bar") interchangeably. I've heard that generally setAttribute is more reliable and that using an attribute is faster, but is that still the case with these somewhat nonstandard attributes?

• javascript
• html
• dom
• attributes

Share Improve this question Follow asked Aug 8, 2017 at 22:15 pocketg99pocketg99 12411 silver badge1212 bronze badges

Add a ment  | 

2 Answers 2

Sorted by: Reset to default 3

Generally setAttribute() is faster. You can always check jsPerf.

In terms of performance I could not tell you wich is more faster dataset or element.setAttribute but in term of support a.k.a reliability, dataset is well supported.

You can see the support table here : https://caniuse./#search=dataset

But in my opinion, using dataset produce a cleaner more readable JS code.