Is it a bad practice to add extra attributes to HTML elements?

Question

Sometimes I add an attribute to some of my controls. Like:

Chris Sharma

I know it

Answer 1

I don't believe it's bad practice as such, it's certainly very convenient and is exactly what you would do in an xml environment. More important is the nature of the information you hold in those custom attributes and how they are used within your code.

A nicer alternative would be to hold the data in different way for example the data() functionality of jQuery.