Input elements hold references to their labels

Today I dicovered an MDN page that describes the labels property of textarea elements. I haven't used this property before and started playing around with it.

It turns out that input elements (and textareas) hold references to their connected labels.

Assuming you wrote the HTML below, you can access the label element using labels. labels then returns a NodeList with the connected elements.

<label for="foo">Some input</label>
<input type="text" id="foo">

<script>
  console.log(document.getElementById('foo').labels);
  // NodeList (1) [label]
</script>

I never had a use case for this property, but I bet that accessibility linters use the labels property quite heavily to validate accessible forms. Label your input elements, friends! They are essential to make your forms accessible.

When creating forms, I prefer to place the input elements inside label elements because it increases the clickable area that will focus the input.

I was delighted to find out that the labels property works fine with this approach, too!

<label>
  <span>
    Some input
  </span>
  <input type="text" id="foo">
</label>

<script>
  console.log(document.getElementById('foo').labels);
  // NodeList (1) [label]
</script>

It even returns multiple labels if you're using several labels for one input element.

<label>
  <span>
    Some input
  </span>
  <input type="text" id="foo">
</label>
<label for="foo">Some input</label>

<script>
  console.log(document.getElementById('foo').labels);
  // NodeList (2) [label, label]
</script>

And that's the trivia for today! Maybe you're writing an accessibility linter right now – then labels can be helpful. :)