HTML attributes

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From this post, we will learn about the HTML attributes used to make the web pages and websites with static content.
HTML 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 name is the property you want to set. For example, the <font> element in the example carries an attribute whose name is face, which you can use to indicate which typeface you want the text to appear in.
  • The value is 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 HTML 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:

Try it

<html>
<head>
<title>HTML attributes</title>
</head>
<body>
<font face="arial" color="#CC0000">A font with arial font face.</font>
</body>
</html>

 

Core Attributes:

The four core attributes that can be used on the majority of HTML elements (although not all) are:

  • id
  • title
  • class
  • style

1. The id Attribute: ( HTML Attributes )

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.

Try it

<!DOCTYPE html>
<html>
<head>
<title>HTML attributes</title>
</head>
<body>
<p id="html">This para having id="html"</p>
<p id="css">This para having id="css"</p>
</body>
</html>

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.

2. The title Attribute:

The title attribute gives a suggested title for the element. The syntax for the title attribute is similar to explained for id attribute:
The behavior 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.
For example:
Try it

<p title="this is title">Paragraph with title</p>

The class attribute is used to associate an element with a style sheet and specifies the class of element. You learn more about the use of the class attribute when you will learn Cascading Style Sheet (CSS). So, for now, you can avoid it.

3. The class Attribute:

class attribute is used to give style to the tag by giving css to that class in the stylesheet or inside style. The value of the attribute may also be a space-separated list of class names.

For example:
Try it

<p class="className1 className2 className3">There are three classes in paragraph tag</p>

4. The style Attribute:

The style attribute allows you to specify CSS rules within the element.

For example:
Try it

<p style="font-family:arial; color:#FF0000;">Paragraph with arial font family</p>

Internationalization Attributes:

There are three internationalization attributes, which are available to most (although not all) XHTML elements.

  • dir
  • lang

1. The dir Attribute

The dir attribute is HTML Attributes which 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
ltr Left to right (the default value)
rtl Right to left (for languages such as Hebrew or Arabic that are read right to left)

Example:
Try it

<html dir="rtl">
<head>
<title>Display Directions</title>
</head>
<body>
This is how IE 5 renders right-to-left directed text.
</body>
</html>

2. The lang Attribute:

The lang attribute is HTML Attributes which allows you to indicate the main language used in a document, but this attribute was kept in HTML only for backward compatibility with earlier versions of HTML. This attribute has been replaced by the xml:lang attribute in new XHTML documents.
When included in 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. Ideally, the browser will use lang to better render the text for the user.

Example:
Try it

<html lang="en">
<head>
<title>English Language Page</title>
</head>
<body>
This page is using English Language
</body>
</html>