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Chapter 6: Html Forms, Data, and Ajax > jQuery Data Appreciation
An often misused feature of tag elements is using attributes such as alt or class to attach useful data to an element. For example:
<!DOCTYPE html>
<html>
<head>
<script src=”http://code.jquery.com/jquery-1.6.1.js”></script>
<script type=”text/javascript”>
$(function(){
$( “#randomEl” ).attr( “alt” , “1999” );
});
</script>
</head>
<body>
<img src=”usefulImage.jpg” id=”randomEl”></div>
</body>
</html>
Just for the record, we’re aware of the fact that we can assign “1999” directly to the alt attribute, but just suppose you needed to add the string programmatically. There’s a semantic problem with this because the attribute used to store the data isn’t meaningfully associated. Is 1999 a year, a random integer, or what? A better approach is to use jQuery’s .data() method, which stores arbitrary data for an element with a meaningful key. It takes the following form: