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Is it alright to add custom Html attributes?

Asked 2009-01-13T14:24:49.497
22

I have a site I'm working on where I want to mark if a row of data has been changed. If something has been changed in that row I would mark it with a custom attribute like so.

<tr>
  <td isDirty="true">
     ....row data
  <td>
</tr>

This works great with jQuery and it doesn't add to much code to my page.

But is this really the correct way of doing something like this and what are the downsides?

I guess another way of doing this would be like this, but it seems like over kill.

<tr>
  <td>
     ....row data
     <input id="isDirty" type="hidden" value="true" />
  <td>
</tr>
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1 Answer

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I believe that there is not a "Yes" or "No" answer to your question. Using custom attributes will help you have cleaner and shorter code in many circumstances. Your example is trivial and I believe that it can't demonstrate the power and flexibility of this technique. Specifically you are dealing with a boolean attribute, which most likely has to do with appearance. These kind of things are better handled with a class. However, with custom attributes you could add context to your nodes. You could use this context to do some calculations. For example, add a price or a weight attribute to the nodes of the list. You then later use these fields to calculate the sum or average. I am sure that there are many better than this examples out there.

On the other hand custom attributes will prevent the html from passing validation testing. This is an important problem and it may get even more important in the future.

answered 2009-01-13T14:32:41.290

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