Slight rework of setHTML to clarify removed elements #41695
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hamishwillee
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hamishwillee
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Oct 26, 2025
hamishwillee
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Oct 26, 2025
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Josh-Cena
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| The **`setHTML()`** method of the {{domxref("Element")}} interface provides an XSS-safe method to parse and sanitize a string of HTML and insert it into the DOM as a subtree of the element. | ||
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| The method removes any elements and attributes that are considered XSS-unsafe, even if allowed by a passed sanitizer. | ||
| Notably, the following elements are always removed: {{HTMLElement("script")}}, {{HTMLElement("frame")}}, {{HTMLElement("iframe")}}, {{HTMLElement("object")}}, {{SVGElement("use")}}, event handler attributes, and data attributes. |
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Does it remove data attributes always? Reading the spec https://wicg.github.io/sanitizer-api/#sanitizerconfig-remove-unsafe, I only see the baseline config (which btw includes 6 distinct elements; <embed> is missed here) plus event handler attributes.
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Thanks for your care. Correct - the data attributes are removed by the default sanitizer but are not always removed. I tidied this up in #41715
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This follows #41677 with some tweaks.
Specifically the issue made the valid point that it is useful to highlight/overview what elements are considered XSS unsafe. But then it applied that information alongside the sanitizer options. That's not the right place, because the method ignores any unsafe values in the sanitizer configuration.