Is it a bad practice to add extra attributes to HTML elements?

Question

Sometimes I add an attribute to some of my controls. Like:

<a href id="myLlink" isClimber="True">Chris Sharma</a>

I know it is not a valid html. But it helps me in some cases.

Is this considered as a bad practice? A friend of mine says that it is ok for Intranet environment but on internet it might not be find friendly by search engines.

If it is not a good practice, what are the best practicess?

Thanks

Answer 1

If you are using HTML5 doctype then you can add data attrbutes which are valid.

So something like the following will be valid

<a href id="myLlink" data-isClimber="True">Chris Sharma</a>

Answer 2

Yes. It is considered a bad practice. Your HTML (if it's 4.0) won't validate successfully. Instead, add a class like so:

<a href id="myLlink" class="climber" >...</a>

Remember that you can have multiple classes:

<a href id="myLlink" class="climber girl pretty" >...</a>

And you can use CSS or JQuery to select out stuff based on these classes, and selectively override style based on the combinations:

a.climber             { color: brown; }
a.climber.girl        { color: red; }
a.climber.girl.pretty { color: pink; }