Why InnerHTML Is a Bad Idea and How to Avoid It?

The innerHTML property of the Document Object Model (DOM) is used to set or return an element’s HTML content.

Since it is the easiest and quickest way to change the Document Object Model, the innerHTML property is frequently used to change the content of webpages.

How innerHTML can be dangerous?

The website can become very vulnerable if innerHTML is used constantly. For instance, using it for input fields can cause DOM manipulation, and attackers can use cross-site scripting (XSS) to insert harmful scripts and steal the private and sensitive data stored in session cookies.

As a result, we will learn about the drawbacks of using innerHTML in this article.

Disadvantages of using innerHTML property

Security Risk

As we discussed earlier in this article, innerHTML can lead to serious security vulnerability.

The idea behind an XSS attack with innerHTML is that malicious code is injected into your site and then executed. This is possible because innerHTML renders complete markup rather than just text.

For example,
```
div.innerHTML = '<img src=x onerror="alert(\'XSS Attack\')">';
```
When the javascript file is loaded, the img element is injected into the div container.
Slow Process

innerHTML is much slower to use because its contents are slowly built, and previously parsed contents and elements must be re-parsed, which takes time.
Can break the document

innerHTML does not provide proper validation, so any valid HTML code can be used. This may cause the JavaScript document to break. Even broken HTML can be used, which may cause unexpected problems.

Appending is not supported

Usually, we use += to append in Javascript. When appending in innerHTML, the whole HTML element is re-parsed.

<p id="sentence">quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog</p>
sentence = document.getElementById('sentence')

// The whole element have re-parsed
sentence.innerHTML += '<p> Hello world </p>'

Content is replaced everywhere

No matter what you add, change, or remove, the content passed in innerHTML will replace everything you’ve written in HTML.

HTML
---
<h1 id="title">Hello World</h1>
---

JS
---
const title = document.getElementById('title')
title.innerHTML = "quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog"
---

What is the safe alternative to innerHTML?

On super and simple approach is to use textContent instead of innerHTML. This only injects the text content, no markups and no DOM manipulation.

div.textContent = 'quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog'

If you are allowed using third-party library, then check out DOMPurify which will sanitize HTML and prevent XSS attacks.

Conclusion

Now, you know why you should not prefer using innerHTML property. I hope you have enjoyed reading the article.

Thanks for reading

Let’s connect on Twitter

Thanks for reading!