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This question has been bugging me for a while now. When writing a CSS selector that compares against an element’s attribute like so.
a[rel="nofollow"]
I never know what I should be doing with the quotation marks. Are they really necessary?
Basically, what is the specification for this because I can’t find it on the web site.
Are all of these considered valid?
a[rel="nofollow"]
a[rel='nofollow']
a[rel=nofollow]
I’ve written more extensively on the subject here: Unquoted attribute values in HTML and CSS.
I’ve also created a tool to help you answer your question: http://mothereff.in/unquoted-attributes
You can usually omit the quotes as long as the attribute value is alphanumeric (however, there are some exceptions — see the linked article for all the details). Anyhow, I find it to be good practice to add the quotes anyway in case you need them, i.e.
a[href^=http://]won’t work, buta[href^="http://"]will.The article I mentioned links to the appropriate chapters in the CSS spec.