Related
When creating the id attributes for HTML elements, what rules are there for the value?
For HTML 4, the answer is technically:
ID and NAME tokens must begin with a letter ([A-Za-z]) and may be followed by any number of letters, digits ([0-9]), hyphens ("-"), underscores ("_"), colons (":"), and periods (".").
HTML 5 is even more permissive, saying only that an id must contain at least one character and may not contain any space characters.
The id attribute is case sensitive in XHTML.
As a purely practical matter, you may want to avoid certain characters. Periods, colons and '#' have special meaning in CSS selectors, so you will have to escape those characters using a backslash in CSS or a double backslash in a selector string passed to jQuery. Think about how often you will have to escape a character in your stylesheets or code before you go crazy with periods and colons in ids.
For example, the HTML declaration <div id="first.name"></div> is valid. You can select that element in CSS as #first\.name and in jQuery like so: $('#first\\.name'). But if you forget the backslash, $('#first.name'), you will have a perfectly valid selector looking for an element with id first and also having class name. This is a bug that is easy to overlook. You might be happier in the long run choosing the id first-name (a hyphen rather than a period), instead.
You can simplify your development tasks by strictly sticking to a naming convention. For example, if you limit yourself entirely to lower-case characters and always separate words with either hyphens or underscores (but not both, pick one and never use the other), then you have an easy-to-remember pattern. You will never wonder "was it firstName or FirstName?" because you will always know that you should type first_name. Prefer camel case? Then limit yourself to that, no hyphens or underscores, and always, consistently use either upper-case or lower-case for the first character, don't mix them.
A now very obscure problem was that at least one browser, Netscape 6, incorrectly treated id attribute values as case-sensitive. That meant that if you had typed id="firstName" in your HTML (lower-case 'f') and #FirstName { color: red } in your CSS (upper-case 'F'), that buggy browser would have failed to set the element's color to red. At the time of this edit, April 2015, I hope you aren't being asked to support Netscape 6. Consider this a historical footnote.
From the HTML 4 specification:
ID and NAME tokens must begin with a letter ([A-Za-z]) and may be followed by any number of letters, digits ([0-9]), hyphens ("-"), underscores ("_"), colons (":"), and periods (".").
A common mistake is to use an ID that starts with a digit.
You can technically use colons and periods in id/name attributes, but I would strongly suggest avoiding both.
In CSS (and several JavaScript libraries like jQuery), both the period and the colon have special meaning and you will run into problems if you're not careful. Periods are class selectors and colons are pseudo-selectors (eg., ":hover" for an element when the mouse is over it).
If you give an element the id "my.cool:thing", your CSS selector will look like this:
#my.cool:thing { ... /* some rules */ ... }
Which is really saying, "the element with an id of 'my', a class of 'cool' and the 'thing' pseudo-selector" in CSS-speak.
Stick to A-Z of any case, numbers, underscores and hyphens. And as said above, make sure your ids are unique.
That should be your first concern.
HTML5: Permitted Values for ID & Class Attributes
As of HTML5, the only restrictions on the value of an ID are:
must be unique in the document
must not contain any space characters
must contain at least one character
Similar rules apply to classes (except for the uniqueness, of course).
So the value can be all digits, just one digit, just punctuation characters, include special characters, whatever. Just no whitespace. This is very different from HTML4.
In HTML 4, ID values must begin with a letter, which can then be followed only by letters, digits, hyphens, underscores, colons and periods.
In HTML5 these are valid:
<div id="999"> ... </div>
<div id="#%LV-||"> ... </div>
<div id="____V"> ... </div>
<div id="⌘⌥"> ... </div>
<div id="♥"> ... </div>
<div id="{}"> ... </div>
<div id="©"> ... </div>
<div id="♤₩¤☆€~¥"> ... </div>
Just bear in mind that using numbers, punctuation or special characters in the value of an ID may cause trouble in other contexts (e.g., CSS, JavaScript, regex).
For example, the following ID is valid in HTML5:
<div id="9lions"> ... </div>
However, it is invalid in CSS:
From the CSS2.1 spec:
4.1.3 Characters and case
In CSS, identifiers (including element names, classes, and IDs in
selectors) can contain only the characters [a-zA-Z0-9] and ISO 10646
characters U+00A0 and higher, plus the hyphen (-) and the underscore
(_); they cannot start with a digit, two hyphens, or a hyphen
followed by a digit.
In most cases you may be able to escape characters in contexts where they have restrictions or special meaning.
W3C References
HTML5
3.2.5.1 The id
attribute
The id attribute specifies its element's unique identifier (ID).
The value must be unique amongst all the IDs in the element's home
subtree and must contain at least one character. The value must not
contain any space characters.
Note: There are no other restrictions on what form an ID can take; in
particular, IDs can consist of just digits, start with a digit, start
with an underscore, consist of just punctuation, etc.
3.2.5.7 The class
attribute
The attribute, if specified, must have a value that is a set of
space-separated tokens representing the various classes that the
element belongs to.
The classes that an HTML element has assigned to it consists of all
the classes returned when the value of the class attribute is split on
spaces. (Duplicates are ignored.)
There are no additional restrictions on the tokens authors can use in
the class attribute, but authors are encouraged to use values that
describe the nature of the content, rather than values that describe
the desired presentation of the content.
jQuery does handle any valid ID name. You just need to escape metacharacters (i.e., dots, semicolons, square brackets...). It's like saying that JavaScript has a problem with quotes only because you can't write
var name = 'O'Hara';
Selectors in jQuery API (see bottom note)
Strictly it should match
[A-Za-z][-A-Za-z0-9_:.]*
But jQuery seems to have problems with colons, so it might be better to avoid them.
HTML5:
It gets rid of the additional restrictions on the id attribute (see here). The only requirements left (apart from being unique in the document) are:
the value must contain at least one character (can’t be empty)
it can’t contain any space characters.
Pre-HTML5:
ID should match:
[A-Za-z][-A-Za-z0-9_:.]*
Must start with A-Z or a-z characters
May contain - (hyphen), _ (underscore), : (colon) and . (period)
But one should avoid : and . because:
For example, an ID could be labelled "a.b:c" and referenced in the style sheet as #a.b:c, but as well as being the id for the element, it could mean id "a", class "b", pseudo-selector "c". It is best to avoid the confusion and stay away from using . and : altogether.
In practice many sites use id attributes starting with numbers, even though this is technically not valid HTML.
The HTML 5 draft specification loosens up the rules for the id and name attributes: they are now just opaque strings which cannot contain spaces.
Hyphens, underscores, periods, colons, numbers and letters are all valid for use with CSS and jQuery. The following should work, but it must be unique throughout the page and also must start with a letter [A-Za-z].
Working with colons and periods needs a bit more work, but you can do it as the following example shows.
<html>
<head>
<title>Cake</title>
<style type="text/css">
#i\.Really\.Like\.Cake {
color: green;
}
#i\:Really\:Like\:Cake {
color: blue;
}
</style>
</head>
<body>
<div id="i.Really.Like.Cake">Cake</div>
<div id="testResultPeriod"></div>
<div id="i:Really:Like:Cake">Cake</div>
<div id="testResultColon"></div>
<script type="text/javascript" src="http://ajax.googleapis.com/ajax/libs/jquery/1.4.2/jquery.min.js"></script>
<script type="text/javascript">
$(function() {
var testPeriod = $("#i\\.Really\\.Like\\.Cake");
$("#testResultPeriod").html("found " + testPeriod.length + " result.");
var testColon = $("#i\\:Really\\:Like\\:Cake");
$("#testResultColon").html("found " + testColon.length + " result.");
});
</script>
</body>
</html>
HTML5
Keeping in mind that ID must be unique, i.e., there must not be multiple elements in a document that have the same id value.
The rules about ID content in HTML5 are (apart from being unique):
This attribute's value must not contain white spaces. [...]
Though this restriction has been lifted in HTML 5, an ID should start with a letter for compatibility.
This is the W3 spec about ID (from MDN):
Any string, with the following restrictions:
must be at least one character long
must not contain any space characters
Previous versions of HTML placed greater restrictions on the content of ID values (for example, they did not permit ID values to begin with a number).
More information:
W3 - global attributes (id)
MDN attribute (id)
To reference an id with a period in it, you need to use a backslash. I am not sure if it's the same for hyphens or underscores.
For example:
HTML
<div id="maintenance.instrumentNumber">############0218</div>
CSS
#maintenance\.instrumentNumber{word-wrap:break-word;}
From the HTML 4 specification...
The ID and NAME tokens must begin with a letter ([A-Za-z]) and may be followed by any number of letters, digits ([0-9]), hyphens ("-"), underscores ("_"), colons (":"), and periods (".").
Also, never forget that an ID is unique. Once used, the ID value may not appear again anywhere in the document.
You may have many ID's, but all must have a unique value.
On the other hand, there is the class-element. Just like ID, it can appear many times, but the value may be used over and over again.
A unique identifier for the element.
There must not be multiple elements in a document that have the same id value.
Any string, with the following restrictions:
must be at least one character long
must not contain any space characters:
U+0020 SPACE
U+0009 CHARACTER TABULATION (tab)
U+000A LINE FEED (LF)
U+000C FORM FEED (FF)
U+000D CARRIAGE RETURN (CR)
Using characters except ASCII letters and digits, '_', '-' and '.' may cause compatibility problems, as they weren't allowed in HTML 4. Though this restriction has been lifted in HTML 5, an ID should start with a letter for compatibility.
It appears that, although colons (:) and periods (.) are valid in the HTML specification, they are invalid as id selectors in CSS, so they are probably best avoided if you intend to use them for that purpose.
For HTML5:
The value must be unique amongst all the IDs in the element’s home
subtree and must contain at least one character. The value must not
contain any space characters.
At least one character, no spaces.
This opens the door for valid use cases such as using accented characters. It also gives us plenty of more ammo to shoot ourselves in the foot with, since you can now use id values that will cause problems with both CSS and JavaScript unless you’re really careful.
IDs are best suited for naming parts of your layout, so you should not give the same name for ID and class
ID allows alphanumeric and special characters
but avoid using the # : . * ! symbols
spaces are not allowed
not started with numbers or a hyphen followed by a digit
case sensitive
using ID selectors is faster than using class selectors
use hyphen "-" (underscore "_" can also be used, but it is not good for SEO) for long CSS class or Id rule names
If a rule has an ID selector as its key selector, don’t add the tag name to the rule. Since IDs are unique, adding a tag name would slow down the matching process needlessly.
In HTML5, the id attribute can be used on any HTML element and In HTML 4.01, the id attribute cannot be used with: <base>, <head>, <html>, <meta>, <param>, <script>, <style>, and <title>.
Any alpha-numeric value,"-", and "_" are valid. But, you should start the id name with any character between A-Z or a-z.
Since ES2015 we can as well use almost all Unicode characters for ID's, if the document character set is set to UTF-8.
Test out here: https://mothereff.in/js-variables
Read about it: Valid JavaScript variable names in ES2015
In ES2015, identifiers must start with $, _, or any symbol with the
Unicode derived core property ID_Start.
The rest of the identifier can contain $, _, U+200C zero width
non-joiner, U+200D zero width joiner, or any symbol with the Unicode
derived core property ID_Continue.
const target = document.querySelector("div").id
console.log("Div id:", target )
document.getElementById(target).style.background = "chartreuse"
div {
border: 5px blue solid;
width: 100%;
height: 200px
}
<div id="H̹̙̦̮͉̩̗̗ͧ̇̏̊̾Eͨ͆͒̆ͮ̃͏̷̮̣̫̤̣Cͯ̂͐͏̨̛͔̦̟͈̻O̜͎͍͙͚̬̝̣̽ͮ͐͗̀ͤ̍̀͢M̴̡̲̭͍͇̼̟̯̦̉̒͠Ḛ̛̙̞̪̗ͥͤͩ̾͑̔͐ͅṮ̴̷̷̗̼͍̿̿̓̽͐H̙̙̔̄͜"></div>
Should you use it? Probably not a good idea!
Read about it: JavaScript: "Syntax error missing } after function body"
No spaces, and it must begin with at least a character from a to z and 0 to 9.
In HTML
ID should start with {A-Z} or {a-z}. You can add digits, periods, hyphens, underscores, and colons.
For example:
<span id="testID2"></span>
<span id="test-ID2"></span>
<span id="test_ID2"></span>
<span id="test:ID2"></span>
<span id="test.ID2"></span>
But even though you can make ID with colons (:) or period (.). It is hard for CSS to use these IDs as a selector. Mainly when you want to use pseudo elements (:before and :after).
Also in JavaScript it is hard to select these ID's.
So you should use first four ID's as the preferred way by many developers around and if it's necessary then you can use the last two also.
Walues can be: [a-z], [A-Z], [0-9], [* _ : -]
It is used for HTML5...
We can add id with any tag.
Help, my Javascript is broken!
Everyone says IDs can't be duplicates.
Best tried in every browser but FireFox
<div id="ONE"></div>
<div id="ONE"></div>
<div id="ONE"></div>
<script>
document.body.append( document.querySelectorAll("#ONE").length , ' DIVs!')
document.body.append( ' in a ', typeof ONE )
console.log( ONE ); // a global var !!
</script>
Explanation
After the turn of the century Microsoft had 90% Browser Market share,
and implemented Browser behaviours that where never standardized:
1. create global variables for every ID
2. create an Array for duplicate IDs
All later Browser vendors copied this behaviour, otherwise their browser wouldn't support older sites.
Somewhere around 2015 Mozilla removed 2. from FireFox and 1. still works.
All other browsers still do 1. and 2.
I use it every day because typing ONE instead of document.querySelector("#ONE") helps me prototype faster; I do not use it in production.
Html ID
The id attribute specifies its element's unique identifier (ID).
There are no other restrictions on what form an ID can take; in particular, IDs can consist of just digits, start with a digit, start with an underscore, consist of just punctuation, etc.
An element's unique identifier can be used for a variety of purposes, most notably as a way to link to specific parts of a document using fragments, as a way to target an element when scripting, and as a way to style a specific element from CSS.
Uppercase and lowercase alphabets works
'_' and '-' works, too
Numbers works
Colons (,) and period (.) seems to work
Interestingly, emojis work
alphabets → caps & small
digits → 0-9
special characters → ':', '-', '_', '.'
The format should be either starting from '.' or an alphabet, followed by either of the special characters of more alphabets or numbers. The value of the id field must not end at an '_'.
Also, spaces are not allowed, if provided, they are treated as different values, which is not valid in case of the id attributes.
In HTML we use id's and classes. we can choose any name for id.Can we choose any name for class also? Or is there any specification name for classes ?
From the HTML 5 specification:
ID:
The id attribute specifies its element's unique identifier (ID). The
value must be unique amongst all the IDs in the element's home subtree
and must contain at least one character. The value must not contain
any space characters.
There are no other restrictions on what form an ID can take; in
particular, IDs can consist of just digits, start with a digit, start
with an underscore, consist of just punctuation, etc.
Class:
The attribute, if specified, must have a value that is a set of
space-separated tokens representing the various classes that the
element belongs to.
The classes that an HTML element has assigned to it consists of all
the classes returned when the value of the class attribute is split on
spaces. (Duplicates are ignored.)
Also, there are style guides that define good and very used pattern for choose the values to use for id or classes, etc. I recommend you this one from W3Schools.
I was having some trouble with two links that was linking to two different parts of a webpage, one further down the page than the other, i had done the following:
<a class="nav-link" href="#portfolio">Portfolio</a>
<a class="nav-link" href="#cv">CV</a>
...
...
<a id="portfolio"></a>
...
...
...
<a id="cv"></a>
It seems to only partially work. Clicking the portfolio link got me to the portfolio section, but the cv link did not work. However once i changed the cv link to this it worked:
<a class="nav-link" href="#portfolio">Portfolio</a>
<a class="nav-link" href="#info">CV</a>
...
...
<a id="portfolio"></a>
...
...
...
<a id="info"></a>
I know that you can't start an ID with a number, but is there also a minimum requirement for digits/length as well?
It should be at least one letter.
Check the rules here from the MDN:
This attribute's value is an opaque string: this means that web author must not use it to convey any information. Particular meaning, for example semantic meaning, must not be derived from the string.
This attribute's value must not contain white spaces. Browsers treat non-conforming IDs that contains white spaces as if the white space is part of the ID. In contrast to the class attribute, which allows space-separated values, elements can only have one single ID defined through the id attribute. Note that an element may have several IDs, but the others should be set by another means, such as via a script interfacing with the DOM interface of the element.
Using characters except ASCII letters and digits, '_', '-' and '.' may cause compatibility problems, as they weren't allowed in HTML 4. Though this restriction has been lifted in HTML 5, an ID should start with a letter for compatibility.
Check also the HTML5 specs:
The id attribute specifies its element's unique identifier (ID). [DOM]
The value must be unique amongst all the IDs in the element's home subtree and must contain at least one character. The value must not contain any space characters.
There are no other restrictions on what form an ID can take; in particular, IDs can consist of just digits, start with a digit, start with an underscore, consist of just punctuation, etc.
An element's unique identifier can be used for a variety of purposes, most notably as a way to link to specific parts of a document using fragment identifiers, as a way to target an element when scripting, and as a way to style a specific element from CSS.
Identifiers are opaque strings. Particular meanings should not be derived from the value of the id attribute.
There's no minimum length requirement for id except that it must be non-empty.
But there's a constraint that there MUST NOT be 2+ elements with the same id in a single HTML document.
Short ids make collisions more probable.
Note that scripts (e.g. some widget plugins) may dynamically create elements with ids, or change elements' ids. Maybe that's happening on your page.
You may use the following bookmarklet to find out whether an element with id=='cv' already exists on your page:
javascript:alert(document.getElementById("cv"));
It should output null if there's no such element, or something like [object ...] if there's one.
Or more general:
javascript:alert(document.getElementById(prompt("enter id: "))==null ? "No elements with such id" : "There is an element with such id");
When creating the id attributes for HTML elements, what rules are there for the value?
For HTML 4, the answer is technically:
ID and NAME tokens must begin with a letter ([A-Za-z]) and may be followed by any number of letters, digits ([0-9]), hyphens ("-"), underscores ("_"), colons (":"), and periods (".").
HTML 5 is even more permissive, saying only that an id must contain at least one character and may not contain any space characters.
The id attribute is case sensitive in XHTML.
As a purely practical matter, you may want to avoid certain characters. Periods, colons and '#' have special meaning in CSS selectors, so you will have to escape those characters using a backslash in CSS or a double backslash in a selector string passed to jQuery. Think about how often you will have to escape a character in your stylesheets or code before you go crazy with periods and colons in ids.
For example, the HTML declaration <div id="first.name"></div> is valid. You can select that element in CSS as #first\.name and in jQuery like so: $('#first\\.name'). But if you forget the backslash, $('#first.name'), you will have a perfectly valid selector looking for an element with id first and also having class name. This is a bug that is easy to overlook. You might be happier in the long run choosing the id first-name (a hyphen rather than a period), instead.
You can simplify your development tasks by strictly sticking to a naming convention. For example, if you limit yourself entirely to lower-case characters and always separate words with either hyphens or underscores (but not both, pick one and never use the other), then you have an easy-to-remember pattern. You will never wonder "was it firstName or FirstName?" because you will always know that you should type first_name. Prefer camel case? Then limit yourself to that, no hyphens or underscores, and always, consistently use either upper-case or lower-case for the first character, don't mix them.
A now very obscure problem was that at least one browser, Netscape 6, incorrectly treated id attribute values as case-sensitive. That meant that if you had typed id="firstName" in your HTML (lower-case 'f') and #FirstName { color: red } in your CSS (upper-case 'F'), that buggy browser would have failed to set the element's color to red. At the time of this edit, April 2015, I hope you aren't being asked to support Netscape 6. Consider this a historical footnote.
From the HTML 4 specification:
ID and NAME tokens must begin with a letter ([A-Za-z]) and may be followed by any number of letters, digits ([0-9]), hyphens ("-"), underscores ("_"), colons (":"), and periods (".").
A common mistake is to use an ID that starts with a digit.
You can technically use colons and periods in id/name attributes, but I would strongly suggest avoiding both.
In CSS (and several JavaScript libraries like jQuery), both the period and the colon have special meaning and you will run into problems if you're not careful. Periods are class selectors and colons are pseudo-selectors (eg., ":hover" for an element when the mouse is over it).
If you give an element the id "my.cool:thing", your CSS selector will look like this:
#my.cool:thing { ... /* some rules */ ... }
Which is really saying, "the element with an id of 'my', a class of 'cool' and the 'thing' pseudo-selector" in CSS-speak.
Stick to A-Z of any case, numbers, underscores and hyphens. And as said above, make sure your ids are unique.
That should be your first concern.
HTML5: Permitted Values for ID & Class Attributes
As of HTML5, the only restrictions on the value of an ID are:
must be unique in the document
must not contain any space characters
must contain at least one character
Similar rules apply to classes (except for the uniqueness, of course).
So the value can be all digits, just one digit, just punctuation characters, include special characters, whatever. Just no whitespace. This is very different from HTML4.
In HTML 4, ID values must begin with a letter, which can then be followed only by letters, digits, hyphens, underscores, colons and periods.
In HTML5 these are valid:
<div id="999"> ... </div>
<div id="#%LV-||"> ... </div>
<div id="____V"> ... </div>
<div id="⌘⌥"> ... </div>
<div id="♥"> ... </div>
<div id="{}"> ... </div>
<div id="©"> ... </div>
<div id="♤₩¤☆€~¥"> ... </div>
Just bear in mind that using numbers, punctuation or special characters in the value of an ID may cause trouble in other contexts (e.g., CSS, JavaScript, regex).
For example, the following ID is valid in HTML5:
<div id="9lions"> ... </div>
However, it is invalid in CSS:
From the CSS2.1 spec:
4.1.3 Characters and case
In CSS, identifiers (including element names, classes, and IDs in
selectors) can contain only the characters [a-zA-Z0-9] and ISO 10646
characters U+00A0 and higher, plus the hyphen (-) and the underscore
(_); they cannot start with a digit, two hyphens, or a hyphen
followed by a digit.
In most cases you may be able to escape characters in contexts where they have restrictions or special meaning.
W3C References
HTML5
3.2.5.1 The id
attribute
The id attribute specifies its element's unique identifier (ID).
The value must be unique amongst all the IDs in the element's home
subtree and must contain at least one character. The value must not
contain any space characters.
Note: There are no other restrictions on what form an ID can take; in
particular, IDs can consist of just digits, start with a digit, start
with an underscore, consist of just punctuation, etc.
3.2.5.7 The class
attribute
The attribute, if specified, must have a value that is a set of
space-separated tokens representing the various classes that the
element belongs to.
The classes that an HTML element has assigned to it consists of all
the classes returned when the value of the class attribute is split on
spaces. (Duplicates are ignored.)
There are no additional restrictions on the tokens authors can use in
the class attribute, but authors are encouraged to use values that
describe the nature of the content, rather than values that describe
the desired presentation of the content.
jQuery does handle any valid ID name. You just need to escape metacharacters (i.e., dots, semicolons, square brackets...). It's like saying that JavaScript has a problem with quotes only because you can't write
var name = 'O'Hara';
Selectors in jQuery API (see bottom note)
Strictly it should match
[A-Za-z][-A-Za-z0-9_:.]*
But jQuery seems to have problems with colons, so it might be better to avoid them.
HTML5:
It gets rid of the additional restrictions on the id attribute (see here). The only requirements left (apart from being unique in the document) are:
the value must contain at least one character (can’t be empty)
it can’t contain any space characters.
Pre-HTML5:
ID should match:
[A-Za-z][-A-Za-z0-9_:.]*
Must start with A-Z or a-z characters
May contain - (hyphen), _ (underscore), : (colon) and . (period)
But one should avoid : and . because:
For example, an ID could be labelled "a.b:c" and referenced in the style sheet as #a.b:c, but as well as being the id for the element, it could mean id "a", class "b", pseudo-selector "c". It is best to avoid the confusion and stay away from using . and : altogether.
In practice many sites use id attributes starting with numbers, even though this is technically not valid HTML.
The HTML 5 draft specification loosens up the rules for the id and name attributes: they are now just opaque strings which cannot contain spaces.
Hyphens, underscores, periods, colons, numbers and letters are all valid for use with CSS and jQuery. The following should work, but it must be unique throughout the page and also must start with a letter [A-Za-z].
Working with colons and periods needs a bit more work, but you can do it as the following example shows.
<html>
<head>
<title>Cake</title>
<style type="text/css">
#i\.Really\.Like\.Cake {
color: green;
}
#i\:Really\:Like\:Cake {
color: blue;
}
</style>
</head>
<body>
<div id="i.Really.Like.Cake">Cake</div>
<div id="testResultPeriod"></div>
<div id="i:Really:Like:Cake">Cake</div>
<div id="testResultColon"></div>
<script type="text/javascript" src="http://ajax.googleapis.com/ajax/libs/jquery/1.4.2/jquery.min.js"></script>
<script type="text/javascript">
$(function() {
var testPeriod = $("#i\\.Really\\.Like\\.Cake");
$("#testResultPeriod").html("found " + testPeriod.length + " result.");
var testColon = $("#i\\:Really\\:Like\\:Cake");
$("#testResultColon").html("found " + testColon.length + " result.");
});
</script>
</body>
</html>
HTML5
Keeping in mind that ID must be unique, i.e., there must not be multiple elements in a document that have the same id value.
The rules about ID content in HTML5 are (apart from being unique):
This attribute's value must not contain white spaces. [...]
Though this restriction has been lifted in HTML 5, an ID should start with a letter for compatibility.
This is the W3 spec about ID (from MDN):
Any string, with the following restrictions:
must be at least one character long
must not contain any space characters
Previous versions of HTML placed greater restrictions on the content of ID values (for example, they did not permit ID values to begin with a number).
More information:
W3 - global attributes (id)
MDN attribute (id)
To reference an id with a period in it, you need to use a backslash. I am not sure if it's the same for hyphens or underscores.
For example:
HTML
<div id="maintenance.instrumentNumber">############0218</div>
CSS
#maintenance\.instrumentNumber{word-wrap:break-word;}
From the HTML 4 specification...
The ID and NAME tokens must begin with a letter ([A-Za-z]) and may be followed by any number of letters, digits ([0-9]), hyphens ("-"), underscores ("_"), colons (":"), and periods (".").
Also, never forget that an ID is unique. Once used, the ID value may not appear again anywhere in the document.
You may have many ID's, but all must have a unique value.
On the other hand, there is the class-element. Just like ID, it can appear many times, but the value may be used over and over again.
A unique identifier for the element.
There must not be multiple elements in a document that have the same id value.
Any string, with the following restrictions:
must be at least one character long
must not contain any space characters:
U+0020 SPACE
U+0009 CHARACTER TABULATION (tab)
U+000A LINE FEED (LF)
U+000C FORM FEED (FF)
U+000D CARRIAGE RETURN (CR)
Using characters except ASCII letters and digits, '_', '-' and '.' may cause compatibility problems, as they weren't allowed in HTML 4. Though this restriction has been lifted in HTML 5, an ID should start with a letter for compatibility.
It appears that, although colons (:) and periods (.) are valid in the HTML specification, they are invalid as id selectors in CSS, so they are probably best avoided if you intend to use them for that purpose.
For HTML5:
The value must be unique amongst all the IDs in the element’s home
subtree and must contain at least one character. The value must not
contain any space characters.
At least one character, no spaces.
This opens the door for valid use cases such as using accented characters. It also gives us plenty of more ammo to shoot ourselves in the foot with, since you can now use id values that will cause problems with both CSS and JavaScript unless you’re really careful.
IDs are best suited for naming parts of your layout, so you should not give the same name for ID and class
ID allows alphanumeric and special characters
but avoid using the # : . * ! symbols
spaces are not allowed
not started with numbers or a hyphen followed by a digit
case sensitive
using ID selectors is faster than using class selectors
use hyphen "-" (underscore "_" can also be used, but it is not good for SEO) for long CSS class or Id rule names
If a rule has an ID selector as its key selector, don’t add the tag name to the rule. Since IDs are unique, adding a tag name would slow down the matching process needlessly.
In HTML5, the id attribute can be used on any HTML element and In HTML 4.01, the id attribute cannot be used with: <base>, <head>, <html>, <meta>, <param>, <script>, <style>, and <title>.
Any alpha-numeric value,"-", and "_" are valid. But, you should start the id name with any character between A-Z or a-z.
Since ES2015 we can as well use almost all Unicode characters for ID's, if the document character set is set to UTF-8.
Test out here: https://mothereff.in/js-variables
Read about it: Valid JavaScript variable names in ES2015
In ES2015, identifiers must start with $, _, or any symbol with the
Unicode derived core property ID_Start.
The rest of the identifier can contain $, _, U+200C zero width
non-joiner, U+200D zero width joiner, or any symbol with the Unicode
derived core property ID_Continue.
const target = document.querySelector("div").id
console.log("Div id:", target )
document.getElementById(target).style.background = "chartreuse"
div {
border: 5px blue solid;
width: 100%;
height: 200px
}
<div id="H̹̙̦̮͉̩̗̗ͧ̇̏̊̾Eͨ͆͒̆ͮ̃͏̷̮̣̫̤̣Cͯ̂͐͏̨̛͔̦̟͈̻O̜͎͍͙͚̬̝̣̽ͮ͐͗̀ͤ̍̀͢M̴̡̲̭͍͇̼̟̯̦̉̒͠Ḛ̛̙̞̪̗ͥͤͩ̾͑̔͐ͅṮ̴̷̷̗̼͍̿̿̓̽͐H̙̙̔̄͜"></div>
Should you use it? Probably not a good idea!
Read about it: JavaScript: "Syntax error missing } after function body"
No spaces, and it must begin with at least a character from a to z and 0 to 9.
In HTML
ID should start with {A-Z} or {a-z}. You can add digits, periods, hyphens, underscores, and colons.
For example:
<span id="testID2"></span>
<span id="test-ID2"></span>
<span id="test_ID2"></span>
<span id="test:ID2"></span>
<span id="test.ID2"></span>
But even though you can make ID with colons (:) or period (.). It is hard for CSS to use these IDs as a selector. Mainly when you want to use pseudo elements (:before and :after).
Also in JavaScript it is hard to select these ID's.
So you should use first four ID's as the preferred way by many developers around and if it's necessary then you can use the last two also.
Walues can be: [a-z], [A-Z], [0-9], [* _ : -]
It is used for HTML5...
We can add id with any tag.
Help, my Javascript is broken!
Everyone says IDs can't be duplicates.
Best tried in every browser but FireFox
<div id="ONE"></div>
<div id="ONE"></div>
<div id="ONE"></div>
<script>
document.body.append( document.querySelectorAll("#ONE").length , ' DIVs!')
document.body.append( ' in a ', typeof ONE )
console.log( ONE ); // a global var !!
</script>
Explanation
After the turn of the century Microsoft had 90% Browser Market share,
and implemented Browser behaviours that where never standardized:
1. create global variables for every ID
2. create an Array for duplicate IDs
All later Browser vendors copied this behaviour, otherwise their browser wouldn't support older sites.
Somewhere around 2015 Mozilla removed 2. from FireFox and 1. still works.
All other browsers still do 1. and 2.
I use it every day because typing ONE instead of document.querySelector("#ONE") helps me prototype faster; I do not use it in production.
Html ID
The id attribute specifies its element's unique identifier (ID).
There are no other restrictions on what form an ID can take; in particular, IDs can consist of just digits, start with a digit, start with an underscore, consist of just punctuation, etc.
An element's unique identifier can be used for a variety of purposes, most notably as a way to link to specific parts of a document using fragments, as a way to target an element when scripting, and as a way to style a specific element from CSS.
Uppercase and lowercase alphabets works
'_' and '-' works, too
Numbers works
Colons (,) and period (.) seems to work
Interestingly, emojis work
alphabets → caps & small
digits → 0-9
special characters → ':', '-', '_', '.'
The format should be either starting from '.' or an alphabet, followed by either of the special characters of more alphabets or numbers. The value of the id field must not end at an '_'.
Also, spaces are not allowed, if provided, they are treated as different values, which is not valid in case of the id attributes.
I understand that an id must be unique within an HTML/XHTML page.
For a given element, can I assign multiple ids to it?
<div id="nested_element_123 task_123"></div>
I realize I have an easy solution with simply using a class. I'm just curious about using ids in this manner.
No. From the XHTML 1.0 Spec
In XML, fragment identifiers are of
type ID, and there can only be a
single attribute of type ID per
element. Therefore, in XHTML 1.0 the
id attribute is defined to be of type
ID. In order to ensure that XHTML 1.0
documents are well-structured XML
documents, XHTML 1.0 documents MUST
use the id attribute when defining
fragment identifiers on the elements
listed above. See the HTML
Compatibility Guidelines for
information on ensuring such anchors
are backward compatible when serving
XHTML documents as media type
text/html.
Contrary to what everyone else said, the correct answer is YES
The Selectors spec is very clear about this:
If an element has multiple ID attributes, all of them must be treated as IDs for that element for the purposes of the ID selector.Such a situation could be reached using mixtures of xml:id, DOM3 Core, XML DTDs, and namespace-specific knowledge.
Edit
Just to clarify: Yes, an XHTML element can have multiple ids, e.g.
<p id="foo" xml:id="bar">
but assigning multiple ids to the same id attribute using a space-separated list is not possible.
No. While the definition from W3C for HTML 4 doesn't seem to explicitly cover your question, the definition of the name and id attribute says no spaces in the identifier:
ID and NAME tokens must begin with a letter ([A-Za-z]) and may be followed by any number of letters, digits ([0-9]), hyphens ("-"), underscores ("_"), colons (":"), and periods (".").
My understanding has always been:
IDs are single use and are only applied to one element...
Each is attributed as a unique identifier to (only) one single element.
Classes can be used more than once...
They can therefore be applied to more than one element, and similarly yet different, there can be more than one class (i.e., multiple classes) per element.
No. Every DOM element, if it has an id, has a single, unique id. You could approximate it using something like:
<div id='enclosing_id_123'><span id='enclosed_id_123'></span></div>
and then use navigation to get what you really want.
If you are just looking to apply styles, class names are better.
You can only have one ID per element, but you can indeed have more than one class. But don't have multiple class attributes; put multiple class values into one attribute.
<div id="foo" class="bar baz bax">
is perfectly legal.
No, you cannot have multiple ids for a single tag, but I have seen a tag with a name attribute and an id attribute which are treated the same by some applications.
No, you should use nested DIVs if you want to head down that path. Besides, even if you could, imagine the confusion it would cause when you run document.getElementByID(). What ID is it going to grab if there are multiple ones?
On a slightly related topic, you can add multiple classes to a DIV. See Eric Myers discussion at,
http://meyerweb.com/eric/articles/webrev/199802a.html
I'd like to say technically yes, since really what gets rendered is technically always browser-dependent. Most browsers try to keep to the specifications as best they can and as far as I know there is nothing in the CSS specifications against it. I'm only going to vouch for the actual HTML, CSS, and JavaScript code that gets sent to the browser before any other interpreter steps in.
However, I also say no since every browser I typically test on doesn't actually let you.
If you need to see for yourself, save the following as a .html file and open it up in the major browsers. In all browsers I tested on, the JavaScript function will not match to an element. However, remove either "hunkojunk" from the id tag and all works fine.
Sample Code
<html>
<head>
</head>
<body>
<p id="hunkojunk1 hunkojunk2"></p>
<script type="text/javascript">
document.getElementById('hunkojunk2').innerHTML = "JUNK JUNK JUNK JUNK JUNK JUNK";
</script>
</body>
</html>
Nay.
From 3.2.3.1 The id attribute:
The value must not contain any space characters.
id="a b" <-- find the space character in that VaLuE.
That said, you can style multiple IDs. But if you're following the specification, the answer is no.
From 7.5.2 Element identifiers: the id and class attributes:
The id attribute assigns a unique identifier to an element (which may
be verified by an SGML parser).
and
ID and NAME tokens must begin with a letter ([A-Za-z]) and may be
followed by any number of letters, digits ([0-9]), hyphens ("-"),
underscores ("_"), colons (":"), and periods (".").
So "id" must be unique and can't contain a space.
No.
Having said that, there's nothing to stop you doing it. But you'll get inconsistent behaviour with the various browsers. Don't do it. One ID per element.
If you want multiple assignations to an element use classes (separated by a space).
Any ID assigned to a div element is unique.
However, you can assign multiple IDs "under", and not "to" a div element.
In that case, you have to represent those IDs as <span></span> IDs.
Say, you want two links in the same HTML page to point to the same div element in the page.
The two different links
<p>Exponential Equations</p>
<p><Logarithmic Expressions</p>
Point to the same section of the page
<!-- Exponential / Logarithmic Equations Calculator -->
<div class="w3-container w3-card white w3-margin-bottom">
<span id="exponentialEquationsCalculator"></span>
<span id="logarithmicEquationsCalculator"></span>
</div>
The simple answer is no, as others have said before me. An element can't have more than one ID and an ID can't be used more than once in a page. Try it out and you'll see how well it doesn't work.
In response to tvanfosson's answer regarding the use of the same ID in two different elements. As far as I'm aware, an ID can only be used once in a page regardless of whether it's attached to a different tag.
By definition, an element needing an ID should be unique, but if you need two ID's then it's not really unique and needs a class instead.
That's interesting, but as far as I know the answer is a firm no. I don't see why you need a nested ID, since you'll usually cross it with another element that has the same nested ID. If you don't there's no point, if you do there's still very little point.
Classes are specially made for this, and
here is the code from which you can understand it:
<html>
<head>
<style type="text/css">
.personal{
height:100px;
width: 100px;
}
.fam{
border: 2px solid #ccc;
}
.x{
background-color:#ccc;
}
</style>
</head>
<body>
<div class="personal fam x"></div>
</body>
</html>
ID's should be unique, so you should only use a particular ID once on a page. Classes may be used repeatedly.
Check HTML id Attribute (W3Schools) for more details.
I don´t think you can have two Id´s but it should be possible. Using the same id twice is a different case... like two people using the same passport. However one person could have multiple passports... Came looking for this since I have a situation where a single employee can have several functions. Say "sysadm" and "team coordinator" having the id="sysadm teamcoordinator" would let me reference them from other pages so that employees.html#sysadm and employees.html#teamcoordinator would lead to the same place... One day somebody else might take over the team coordinator function while the sysadm remains the sysadm... then I only have to change the ids on the employees.html page ... but like I said - it doesn´t work :(