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Can an HTML element have multiple ids?

Asked 2008-10-10T16:04:16.057
374

I understand that an id must be unique within an HTML/XHTML page.

For a given element, can I assign multiple ids to it?

<div id="nested_element_123 task_123"></div>

I realize I have an easy solution with simply using a class. I'm just curious about using ids in this manner.

html xhtml standards-compliance
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1 Answer

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Contrary to what everyone else said, the correct answer is YES

The Selectors spec is very clear about this:

If an element has multiple ID attributes, all of them must be treated as IDs for that element for the purposes of the ID selector.Such a situation could be reached using mixtures of xml:id, DOM3 Core, XML DTDs, and namespace-specific knowledge.

Edit

Just to clarify: Yes, an XHTML element can have multiple ids, e.g.

<p id="foo" xml:id="bar">

but assigning multiple ids to the same id attribute using a space-separated list is not possible.

answered 2011-04-16T07:53:16.787

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