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document updated 12 years ago, on Dec 22, 2011
HTML comes with a bunch of standard elements. But what if you want to invent new elements, and use them in a document. Say, <mountain> or <river>.

Two questions: 1) Can you actually do this? Does this actually work, across all browsers? 2) If it does work, is it a good idea?

Does it work?

Caveats

Apparently, in Internet Explorer, .getElementsByName() doesn't work for non-standard elements. That doesn't mean the elements don't exist in the DOM — they DO, and they can be found by most other methods — they just can't be found via .getElementsByName().

This impacts jQuery, because it uses the native Internet Explorer call, for performance reasons.

Is it a good idea?

I don't know of any Javascript libraries that use this. If it were a good idea, presumably it would be used more?