Comments on: Datasets in HTML 5 and what they’re good for

By: Tomasz Mazur

Tomasz Mazur — Mon, 30 Nov 2009 10:56:29 +0000

Thanks for this plugin. Just wanted to write same functionality for my own purposes :)

By: Destillat KW36-2009 | duetsch.info - GNU/Linux, Open Source, Softwareentwicklung, Selbstmanagement, Vim ...

Fri, 04 Sep 2009 09:59:24 +0000

[...] Datasets in HTML 5 and what they’re good for [...]

By: John Haugeland

John Haugeland — Sat, 29 Aug 2009 03:10:31 +0000

But you could already do this. This has been viable and standards compliant for years. You just use divs and spans, which are allowed unbounded use of attributes.

Several of my web applications have been relying on this sort of thing since the Netscape 4 era.

By: Brett

Brett — Fri, 28 Aug 2009 17:56:34 +0000

It’s also easy to do this (keeps HTML valid and works on old browsers):

document.getElementById(‘foo’).myCustomProperty = ‘bar’;

Always nice to have options though.

By: Barklund

Barklund — Fri, 28 Aug 2009 15:07:37 +0000

@jfk: yes, so have I (as mentioned as the last bullet point). And the whole point of this is, that now it is legal – just name them “data-” :)

@Joost: My note about degradability was a bit too hidden, and I have now changed the above example to convey my actual intentions. The idea in truly degradable sites (using the ideas of Hijax) is, that you should not simply link to the resource that the link changes, but to a version of the page identical to the one, that the javascript-hook creates. If we just linked to the image as you suggest, it would not be graceful degradation, just less crappy degradation ;)

By: Joost

Joost — Fri, 28 Aug 2009 14:44:24 +0000

In this case datasets would not be needed. Simply link to the full size image and use the following code:

$(“ul#thumbnails a”).click(function(e) {
$(“#large-image”).attr(“src”, $(this).attr(‘href’));
return false;
});

By: jfk

jfk — Fri, 28 Aug 2009 14:30:20 +0000

Just for the record – if you don’t care about html validity, just use ‘expando attributes’.

Expando attribute is an html element attribute with name that is not colliding with standard attributes name.

You can read them, write them, etc.

I’m using this feature for years, very handy

By: Scott Wehrenberg

Scott Wehrenberg — Fri, 28 Aug 2009 13:06:28 +0000

Too early in the morning.. I see now where you mention graceful degradation, cheers.

By: Scott Wehrenberg

Scott Wehrenberg — Fri, 28 Aug 2009 12:59:30 +0000

I think you example does an awesome job of displaying the general idea behind datasets, and I too am pretty excited to see it in the spec. However, I don’t think this is quite the optimal markup for a gallery. The main issue I see is that users without javascript won’t have any way to access the full image. That’s the reason most lightbox and similar scripts today have you add the path to the full image on the link around the thumbnail.

By: Rune Bromer

Rune Bromer — Fri, 28 Aug 2009 12:54:55 +0000

Nice :) I always just write a custom attribute on the element, even though it’s ugly as hell.