How do I clear inner HTML

Question

I\'ve been fiddling with this for a while but it won\'t work and I can\'t figure out why. Please help. Here is what I have:

Answer 1

The problem appears to be that the global symbol clear is already in use and your function doesn't succeed in overriding it. If you change that name to something else (I used blah), it works just fine:

Live: Version using clear which fails | Version using blah which works

    


    
lalala
    

    

This is a great illustration of the fundamental principal: Avoid global variables wherever possible. The global namespace in browsers is incredibly crowded, and when conflicts occur, you get weird bugs like this.

A corollary to that is to not use old-style onxyz=... attributes to hook up event handlers, because they require globals. Instead, at least use code to hook things up: Live Copy

    


    
lalala
    

    

...and even better, use DOM2's addEventListener (or attachEvent on IE8 and earlier) so you can have multiple handlers for an event on an element.