Custom attributes - Yea or nay?

Question

Recently I have been reading more and more about people using custom attributes in their HTML tags, mainly for the purpose of embedding some extra bits of data for use in ja

Answer 1

We've made a web-based editor that understands a subset of HTML - a very strict subset (that understood nearly universally by mail clients). We need to express things like in the database, but we can't have that in the DOM, otherwise the browser where the editor runs, freaks out (or is more likely to freak out than it is likely to freak out over custom attributes). We wanted drag-and-drop, so putting it purely in the DOM was out, as was jquery's .data() (the extra data didn't get copied properly). We probably also needed the extra data to come along for the ride in .html(). In the end we settled on using during the editing process, and then when we POST it all, we remove width and do a regex search-and-destroy s/rs-width=/width=/g.

At first the guy writing most of this was the validation-nazi on this issue and tried everything to avoid our custom attribute, but in the end acquiesced when nothing else seemed to work for ALL our requirements. It helped when he realized that the custom attribute would never appear in an email We did consider encoding our extra data in class, but decided that would be the greater of two evils.

Personally, I prefer to have things clean and passing validators etc., but as a company employee I have to remember that my primary responsibility is advancing the company's cause (making as much money as quickly as possible), not that of my egotistical desire for technical purity. Tools should work for us; not us for them.