what disadvantages are there to use innerhtml to populate a div tag

Question

what disadvantages are there to use inner HTML to populate a div tag consider, all scenarios possible. Thanku

Answer 1

One disadvantage is that you'll need to escape special characters manually. So, you'll need to encode characters like >, <, and & (see the Wikipedia article on HTML encoding).

This is pretty trivial to do since there are utilities to do this baked into the .NET libraries, like HttpServerUtility.HtmlEncode, but many people will forget this and not test all the special cases.

Another downside, is that if you're just populating a div with some arbitrary HTML, that means you're probably building the HTML manually, which can go wrong if you're just using string concatenation or something primative like that.

If you're doing this client side, it's much better to just rely on appending elements to the DOM, rather than setting innerHTML.