What is the purpose of textContent in an input element?

Question

Provided an input element in a DOM, it does have a textContent property along with value . It is well known that the value of the input is what shown in the text box, and this element cannot have any children, that is <input>something</input> still gives an empty input followed by a sibling text node, whereas closing tag is completely ignored. But when we set a value to the textContent of this input, it is somehow survives the round-trip:

input.textContent = 'something'
console.log(input.textContent)  // this works

Also, after setting the property, the input appear as having child elements in the inspector:

Maybe it's just me, but I fail to see any logical consistency here. Wouldn't it be nice to have a Type Error on setting text content to the input?

Is there any reasoning behind present behaviour?

Answer 1

The DOM is not HTML, but an API for tree structures that comply with the XML information set Translating <input>something</input> into an input element followed by a text node is the behaviour of the HTML parser, not the behaviour of the DOM.

In fact, if you use XHTML, served as application/xhtml+xml , <input>something</input> will become an input element with a text node child, the same as using .textContent . So it's entirely normal that .textContent works the way it does.