HTML Attributes

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Appliedcode

3 min readAug 10, 2012

Attributes are another important part of HTML markup. An attribute is used to define the characteristics of an element and is placed inside the element’s opening tag. All attributes are made up of two parts: a name and a value:

· The nameis the property you want to set. For example, the <font> element in the example carries an attribute whose name is face, which typeface you want the text to appear in.

· The valueis what you want the value of the property to be. The first example was supposed to use the Arial typeface, so the value of the face attribute is Arial.

The value of the attribute should be put in double quotation marks, and is separated from the name by the equals sign. You can see that a color for the text has been specified as well as the typeface in this <font>element:

Core Attributes:

The four core attributes that can be used on the majority of HTML elements are:

· Id

· Title

· Class

· Style

The id Attribute:

The id attribute can be used to uniquely identify any element within a page (or style sheet).

There are two primary reasons that you might want to use an id attribute on an element:

· If an element carries an id attribute as a unique identifier it is possible to identify just that element and its content.

· If you have two elements of the same name within a Web page(or style sheet), you can use the id attribute to distinguish between elements that have the same name.

<p id=”html”>This para explains what is HTML</p>

<p id=”css”>This para explains what is Cascading Style</p>

Note that there are some special rules for the value of the id attribute, it must:

· Begin with a letter (A,Z or a,z) and can then be followed by any number of letters, digits(0,9), hyphens, underscores, colons and periods.

· Remain unique within that document; no two attributes may have the same value within that HTML document.

The title Attribute:

The title attribute gives a suggested title for the element.

The behaviour of this attribute will depend upon the element that carries it, although it is often displayed as a tooltip or while the element is loading.

<h4 title=”Hello HTML!”>Titled Heading Tag Example</h4>

The class Attribute:

The class attribute is used to associate an element with a style sheet and specifies the class of element. The value of the attribute may also be a space-separated list of class names. For example:

Class=”className1 className2 className3”

The style Attribute:

The Style attribute allows you to specify CSS rules within the element. For example:

Internationalization Attributes:

There are three internationalization attributes, which are available to most XHTML elements.

· dir

· lang

· xml:lang

The dir Attribute:

The dir attribute allows you to indicate to the browser the direction in which the text should flow. The dir attribute can take one of two values, as you can see in the table that follows:

Value

Meaning

Itr

Left to right(the default value)

Rtl

Right to left(for languages such as Hebrew or Arabic that are read right or left)

Example:

<head>

<title>Display Directions</title>

</head>

<body>

This is how IE 5 renders right-to-left directed text.

</body>

</html>

When dir attribute is used within the <html> tag, it determines how text will be presented within the entire document. When used within another tag, it controls the text’s direction for just the content of that tag.

The lang Attribute:

The lang attribute allows you to indicate the main language used in a document, but this attribute was kept in HTML only for backwards compatibility with earlier versions of HTML. This attribute has been replaced by the xml:lang attribute in new XHTML documents.

When included within the <html> tag, the lang attribute specifies the language you’ve generally used within the document. When used within other tags, the lang attribute specifies the language you used within that tag’s content.