Accessing data tag from a non HTML5 browser

Question

I'm a total noob in the web arena, I've been learning jQuery lately. My concern is, will I be able to access the 'data' attribute using jQuery from my HTML if my browser does not support HTML5?

Answer 1

Yes, you can use the data attribute and you will be able to access it with jQuery even if the browser doesn't support HTML5:

var value = $('#foo').data('value');

where you have:

<div id="foo" data-value="bar">Baz</div>

The only thing is that the data attribute is not valid if your DOCTYPE is not HTML5 => if you try to use it in HTML 4.01 Transitional for example the validator will cry but your site will work without issues.