7.5.3 Element meta data: the tags attribute

Attribute definitions

tags = cdata-list [CS]

This attribute assigns a tag name or set of tag names to an element. Any number of elements may be assigned the same tag name or names. Multiple tag names must be separated by white space characters. Tag names that contain white space must be surrounded with matching single or double quote characters.

 

The tags attribute assigns a set of space-delimited keywords (tags) to an element (which may be verified by an SGML parser). For example, the following paragraphs are enriched with tags values:

 

<P tags="intro example tags"> This is an introductory paragraph, to act as an example.</P>

<P tags="conclusion tags"> This paragraph concludes our example about tags.</P>

Note. Other HTML elements and attributes already handle certain pieces of meta data and these may be used by authors instead of the TAGS attribute to specify those pieces: the META element, the TITLE element, the ADDRESS element, the INS and DEL elements, the title attribute, and the cite attribute.

The tags attribute has several roles in HTML:

• As an extensible meta-data repository.
• As a general extensible rating system. (e.g. the tag names ‘*’, ‘**’ and so on can be construed as meaning ‘1-star’ ‘2-stars’ and so on.
• To perform many-many grouping of like elements, including resources pointed to by the href of an anchor.
• For general purpose processing by user agents (e.g. for grouping common elements together across websites or within a website).

Almost every HTML element may be assigned tags information.

Further Reading

• Commentary