Use Node.cloneNode:
var container = document.getElementById('container');
var prototype = document.createElement('div');
prototype.innerHTML = "<p>Adding some <strong>arbitrary</strong> HTML in"
+" here just to illustrate.</p> <p>Some <span>nesting</span> too.</p>"
+"<p>CloneNode doesn't care how the initial nodes are created.</p>";
var prototype_copy = prototype.cloneNode(true);
prototype_copy.id = 'whatever'; //note--must be an Element!
container.appendChild(prototype_copy);
Speed Tips
There are three operations you want to minimize:
String Parsing
This occurs when you use innerHTML. innerHTML is fast when you use it in isolation. It's often faster than the equivalent manual-DOM construction because of the overhead of all those DOM method calls. However, you want to keep innerHTML out of inner loops and you don't want to use it for appending. element.innerHTML += 'more html' in particular has catastrophic run-time behavior as the element's contents get bigger and bigger. It also destroys any event or data binding because all those nodes are destroyed and recreated.
So use innerHTML to create your "prototype" nodes for convenience, but for inner loops use DOM manipulation. To clone your prototypes, use prototype.cloneNode(true) which does not invoke the parser. (Be careful with id attributes in cloned prototypes--you need to make sure yourself that they are unique when you append them to the document!)
Document tree modification (repeated appendChild calls)
Every time you modify the document tree you might trigger a repaint of the document window and update the document DOM node relationships, which can be slow. Instead, batch your appends up into a DocumentFragment and append that to the document DOM only once.
Node lookup
If you already have an in-memory prototype object and want to modify pieces of it, you will need to navigate the DOM to find and modify those pieces whether you use DOM traversal, getElement*, or querySelector*.
Keep these searches out of your inner loops by keeping a reference to the nodes you want to modify when you create the prototype. Then whenever you want to clone a near-identical copy of the prototype, modify the nodes you have references to already and then clone the modified prototype.
Sample Template object
For the heck of it, here is a basic (and probably fast) template object illustrating the use of cloneNode and cached node references (reducing the use of string parsing and Node lookups).
Supply it with a "prototype" node (or string) with class names and data-attr="slotname attributename" attributes. The class names become "slots" for text-content replacement; the elements with data-attr become slots for attribute name setting/replacement. You can then supply an object to the render() method with new values for the slots you have defined, and you will get back a clone of the node with the replacements done.
Example usage is at the bottom.
function Template(proto) {
if (typeof proto === 'string') {
this.proto = this.fromString(proto);
} else {
this.proto = proto.cloneNode(true);
}
this.slots = this.findSlots(this.proto);
}
Template.prototype.fromString = function(str) {
var d = document.createDocumentFragment();
var temp = document.createElement('div');
temp.innerHTML = str;
while (temp.firstChild) {
d.appendChild(temp.firstChild);
}
return d;
};
Template.prototype.findSlots = function(proto) {
// textContent slots
var slots = {};
var tokens = /^s*(w+)s+(w+)s*$/;
var classes = proto.querySelectorAll('[class]');
Array.prototype.forEach.call(classes, function(e) {
var command = ['setText', e];
Array.prototype.forEach.call(e.classList, function(c) {
slots[c] = command;
});
});
var attributes = proto.querySelectorAll('[data-attr]');
Array.prototype.forEach.call(attributes, function(e) {
var matches = e.getAttribute('data-attr').match(tokens);
if (matches) {
slots[matches[1]] = ['setAttr', e, matches[2]];
}
e.removeAttribute('data-attr');
});
return slots;
};
Template.prototype.render = function(data) {
Object.getOwnPropertyNames(data).forEach(function(name) {
var cmd = this.slots[name];
if (cmd) {
this[cmd[0]].apply(this, cmd.slice(1).concat(data[name]));
}
}, this);
return this.proto.cloneNode(true);
};
Template.prototype.setText = (function() {
var d = document.createElement('div');
var txtprop = (d.textContent === '') ? 'textContent' : 'innerText';
d = null;
return function(elem, val) {
elem[txtprop] = val;
};
}());
Template.prototype.setAttr = function(elem, attrname, val) {
elem.setAttribute(attrname, val);
};
var tpl = new Template('<p data-attr="cloneid id">This is clone number <span class="clonenumber">one</span>!</p>');
var tpl_data = {
cloneid: 0,
clonenumber: 0
};
var df = document.createDocumentFragment();
for (var i = 0; i < 100; i++) {
tpl_data.cloneid = 'id' + i;
tpl_data.clonenumber = i;
df.appendChild(tpl.render(tpl_data));
}
document.body.appendChild(df);
