HTML Attribute
We have seen few HTML tags and their usage like heading tags <h1>, <h2>, paragraph
tag <p> and other tags. We used them so far in their simplest form, but most of the HTML
tags can also have attributes, which are extra bits of information.
An attribute is used to define the characteristics of an HTML 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 paragraph <p>
element in the example carries an attribute whose name is align, which you can
use to indicate the alignment of paragraph on the page.
The value is what you want the value of the property to be set and always put
within quotations. The below example shows three possible values of align
attribute: left, center and right.
Attribute names and attribute values are case-insensitive. However, the World Wide Web
Example
<!DOCTYPE html>
<html>
<head>
<title>Align Attribute Example</title>
</head>
<body>
<p align="left">This is left aligned</p>
<p align="center">This is center aligned</p>
<p align="right">This is right aligned</p>
</body>
</html>
This will display the following result:
This is left aligned
This is center aligned
This is right aligned
Core attribute
The four core attributes that can be used on the majority of HTML elements (although not
all) are:
Id
Title
Class
Style
The Id Attribute
The id attribute of an HTML tag can be used to uniquely identify any element within an
HTML page. There are two primary reasons that you might want to use an id attribute on
an element:
1.If an element carries an id attribute as a unique identifier, it is possible to identify
just that element and its content.
2.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.
We will discuss style sheet in separate tutorial. For now, let's use the id attribute to
distinguish between two paragraph elements as shown below.
Example
<p id="html">This para explains what is HTML</p>
<p id="css">This para explains what is Cascading Style Sheet</p>
The title Attribute
The title attribute gives a suggested title for the element.
The syntax for the title attribute is similar as 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 when cursor comes over the element or while the element is loading.
Example
<!DOCTYPE html>
<html>
<head>
<title>The title Attribute Example</title>
</head>
<body>
<h3 title="Hello HTML!">Titled Heading Tag Example</h3>
</body>
</html>
This will produce the following result:
Titled Heading Tag Example
Now try to bring your cursor over "Titled Heading Tag Example" and you will see that
whatever title you used in your code is coming out as a tooltip of the cursor.
The class Attribute
The class attribute is used to associate an element with a style sheet, and specifies the
class of element. You will learn more about the use of the class attribute when you will learn Cascading Style Sheet (CSS). So for now you can avoid it.
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 Cascading Style Sheet (CSS) rules within the element.
<!DOCTYPE html>
<html>
<head>
<title>The style Attribute</title>
</head>
<body>
<p style="font-family:arial; color:#FF0000;">Some text...</p>
</body>
</html>
This will produce the following result:
Some text...
At this point of time, we are not learning CSS, so just let's proceed without bothering much
about Css. Here, you need to understand what are HTML attributes and how they can be
used while formatting content.
Internationalization Attributes
There are three internationalization attributes, which are available for most (although not
all) XHTML elements.
1.dir
2.lang
3.xml:lang
The dir Attribute
The dir attribute allows you to indicate to the browser about 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
<!DOCTYPE html>
<html dir="rtl">
<head>
<title>Display Directions</title>
</head>
<body>
This is how IE 5 renders right-to-left directed text.
</body>
</html>
This will produce the following result:
This is how IE 5 renders right-to-left directed text.
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.
The values of the lang attribute are ISO-639 standard two-character language codes.
Check HTML Language Codes: ISO 639 for a complete list of language code
The xml:lang Attribute
The xml:lang attribute is the XHTML replacement for the lang attribute. The value of thexml:lang attribute should be an ISO-639 country code as mentioned in previous section.
READ MORE<< HTML table
READ MORE<< HTML image
0 Comments