html & [removed] How to store data referring to html elements

Question

I\'m working on a web application that uses ajax to communicate to the server. My specific situation is the following:

I have a list of users lined out in the html p

Answer 1

There are various ways of doing it depending on the kind of data you are storing and how much information you are storing in the page in general. It's best to devise a consistent scheme so you can write a simple library call to do the work. For example,

You can store data in the class of a particular element. This may require additional wrapper elements in order to be able to provide an additional class to drive your CSS. This also restricts the storable content format. User ID may well fit into a class attribute.

You can store data in an unused href of a Javascript activated link. This has the additional feature of showing the data in the status bar as part of the URL on rollover. For instance you can store '#userid' or even just 'userid' in the href.

You can store data in additional elements. For instance you can have a nested div with a class that indicates storage which also triggers CSS to take the element out of the display. This is the most general and extensive support you can probably arrange in page.

Rather than a nested div you could also use nested input tags with type="hidden". This is kind of more expected / traditional and doesn't require CSS to take them out of the display. You can use the id attribute to identify these inputs, or you can use the location on the page. For instance, put them inside the link that the user clicks and then just search inside the current link in the onclick handler.