ProcessingInstruction

The ProcessingInstruction interface represents a processing instruction; that is, a Node which embeds an instruction targeting a specific application but that can be ignored by any other applications which don’t recognize the instruction.

[!WARNING] ProcessingInstruction nodes are only supported in XML documents, not in HTML documents. In these, a process instruction will be considered as a comment and be represented as a Comment object in the tree.

A processing instruction may be different than the XML declaration.

[!NOTE] User-defined processing instructions cannot begin with "xml", as xml-prefixed processing-instruction target names are reserved by the XML specification for particular, standard uses (see, for example, <?xml-stylesheet ?>.

For example:

<?xml version="1.0"?>

is a processing instruction whose target is xml.

Instance properties

This interface also inherits properties from its parent interfaces, CharacterData, Node, and EventTarget.

• sheet Read only

  • : Returns the associated StyleSheet object, if any; or null if none.

• target Read only

  • : A name identifying the application to which the instruction is targeted.

Instance methods

This interface doesn’t have any specific method, but inherits methods from its parent interfaces, CharacterData, Node, and EventTarget.

Specifications

Browser compatibility

See also

• document.createProcessingInstruction()
• The DOM API