Question

I’m writing a chess program with JQuery and I want to keep track of the chess squares (TD’s in a table). I figured I would attach metadata to the square TDs.

What is a good standard to follow when attaching metadata to a table element?

custom attributes?
adding classes?

Answer 1

With jQuery, you can use the .data() method, as it was already pointed out in the comment.

In general, however, metadata attributes in the DOM should have a name starting with
data-:

<div id="stuff" data-mykey="myvalue"/>

See the w3c spec on custom data attributes.