It would be nice to have support for the IE property outerHTML. outerHTML is like innerHTML but it includes the HTML of the current element Below is some rough code how to do the same thing using a dummy element and innerHTML. function getOuterHTML(el) { var dummy = document.createElement("DIV"); div.appendChild(el.cloneNode(true)); return div.innerHTML } IE supports both read and write but I think that write is a bad idea since it destroys the element. Take the code below for example. IE behaves really strange here and it just does not make any sense to me. <div> <div id="test">monkey</div> </div> ... var el = document.getElementById("test"); var p = el.parentNode; el.outerHTML; // "<DIV id=test>monkey</DIV>" el.outerHTML = "<b>bold</b>"; el.innerHTML; // "" el.outerHTML; // "<DIV id=test></DIV>" p.innerHTML; // <B>bold</B> The setter kind of makes sense from a string view of a document (IE4) but not from a DOM view.

bug 92264 comment 4 : "Element.outerHTML is not supported in mozilla, use element.innerHTML or the HTML DOM, WONTFIX." ==> DUPE *** This bug has been marked as a duplicate of 92264 ***