Question

I’ve noticed that jQuery can create, and access non-existent/non-standard HTML tags. For example,

$('body').append('<fake></fake>').html('blah');
var foo = $('fake').html(); // foo === 'blah'

Will this break in some kind of validation? Is it a bad idea, or are there times this is useful? The main question is, although it can be done, should it be done?

Thanks in advance!

Answer 1

There’s really no reason to do something like this. The better way is to use classes like

<p class = "my_class">

And then do something like

$('p.my_class').html('bah');

Edit:

The main reason that it’s bad to use fake tags is because it makes your HTML invalid and could screw up the rendering of your page on certain browsers since they don’t know how to treat the tag you’ve created (though most would treat it as some kind of DIV).

That’s the main reason this isn’t good, it just breaks standards and leads to confusing code that is difficult to maintain because you have to explain what your custom tags are for.

If you were really determined to use custom tags, you could make your web page a valid XML file and then use XSLT to transform the XML into valid HTML. But in this case, I’d just stick with classes.