Is it a bad practice to add extra attributes to HTML elements?

Question

Sometimes I add an attribute to some of my controls. Like:

Chris Sharma

I know it

Answer 1

Yes. It is considered a bad practice. Your HTML (if it's 4.0) won't validate successfully. Instead, add a class like so:

...

Remember that you can have multiple classes:

...

And you can use CSS or JQuery to select out stuff based on these classes, and selectively override style based on the combinations:

a.climber             { color: brown; }
a.climber.girl        { color: red; }
a.climber.girl.pretty { color: pink; }