Is it a good idea to use DOM Element's attributes with custom attribute names

Question

Is it considered good practice to use DOM Element's getAttribute/setAttribute calls to associate additional information about contents of the element ?

For example I want to call setAttribute("MY_ATTRIBUTE_VALUE", "..."), where MY_ATTRIBUTE_VALUE isn't anything applicable to <div>.

Thanks !

Answer 1

You should definitely go with data attributes. Here's an article on them. HTML5 Custom Data Attributes.

Answer 2

It is very good practise as long as you're setting custom data attributes, whose purpose is holding meta data about those elements. Data attributes take the form data-name where name can be any valid descriptor.

Traditionally people would add classes, and in some cases this is still appropriate (e.g. when a class describes the state of an attribute and also denotes a style class, for which class is primarily used).