ProcessingInstruction

BaselineWidely available

This feature is well established and works across many devices and browser versions. It’s been available across browsers since July 2015.

TheProcessingInstruction interface represents aprocessing instruction; that is, aNode 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 aComment object in the tree.

A processing instruction may be different than theXML declaration.

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

For example:

html

<?xml version="1.0"?>

is a processing instruction whosetarget isxml.

Instance properties

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

ProcessingInstruction.sheetRead only: Returns the associatedStyleSheet object, if any; ornull if none.
ProcessingInstruction.targetRead only: A name identifying the application to which the instruction is targeted.