HTML Attributes
We have seen few HTML tags and their usage like heading tags <h1>,<h2>, paragraph tag <p> and other tags. We use 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 the 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 consortium (w3c) recommends lowercase attribute values in their HTML 4 and above recommendations.
<!DOCTYPE html>
<html>
<head>
<title>Align Attribute Example</title>
</head>
<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>
Save this file on your server and see the result.
Core Attributes
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 an element within an HTML page. 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 to distinguish between elements that have the same name.
We will discuss the style sheet in a separate tutorial. For now, let us 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 explain 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 the 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 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>
Save this file on your server and check the result.
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>
Save the code and check the result.
At this point in 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.
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