Best way to add metadata to HTML elements

Question

I'm trying to put together a way of marking up various components in HTML that get parsed by a jQuery script and created when the page loads.

For example, at the moment I can put the following in to my page..

<a href="link.html" class="Theme-Button Theme-Button-Style-win2007 Theme-Button-iconLeft Theme-Button-AlignmentCenter Theme-Button-fullWidth">This is a button</a>

When the jQuery script finds it it'll inject the html necessary to create a button with an icon on it and all the necessary events etc.

However, this is messy and requires a lot of long class names. I'd much rather do something like this...

<a href="#" class="Theme-Button" data="{style: 'win2007', icon: 'left', align:'center', fullWidth: true}"></a>

It's not that much shorter but neater in my opinion and requires less parsing. Trouble is, I've done a little bit of research into "expandos" and I'm fairly sure some browsers won't like it and it won't validate.

Anybody got any better suggestions?

Answer 1

Go ahead and use an attribute for this, but use a data- prefix on it. Attributes with the prefix data- are explicitly allowed on all elements as of HTML5. Example:

<a href="#" class="Theme-Button" data-theme="{style: 'win2007', icon: 'left', align:'center', fullWidth: true}"></a>

It works today in all browsers, and because it's now specified behavior, it's future-proofed.

Answer 2

Use jquery's ".data" property. This is very handy and many people don't know about it.

See this link for more information.