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Editorial Team
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Asked: 2026-05-23T20:23:25+00:00

I need to verify using Selenium (or similar framework) that certain HTML content/items are

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I need to verify using Selenium (or similar framework) that certain HTML content/items are on the page using known unique identifiers.

I have control over the generation of the HTML, so I will mark the HTML tags with an attribute, but sometimes the usual candidates of id, name etc aren’t available for me to use.

Is there an industry standard for such an attribute?
If not, anyone have any good suggestions?

The attribute shouldn’t collide with any known attributes of any HTML elements or affect the web experience/behaviour (I don’t care if someone reads the HTML source and sees it).

Some ideas I have are:

  • trace
  • debug
  • uid

Here’s how I would like to use it for the example identifier “123456789”:

<a trace="123456789" href="http://www.someurl.com">Click me!</a>
<span debug="123456789">Hello world</span>
<strong uid="123456789">Wow</strong>
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1 Answer

  1. Editorial Team

    Use a HTML5 data-* attribute.

    Custom data attributes are intended to store custom data private to
    the page or application, for which there are no more appropriate
    attributes or elements.

    More information here: http://developers.whatwg.org/elements.html#embedding-custom-non-visible-data-with-the-data-*-attributes

    They won’t cause any problems in older browsers: http://caniuse.com/dataset

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