How to comment HTML tag attribute in HTML source code?

Question

For example:

a link

Answer 1

I usually just put _x at the end of the attribute name. Then the attribute is ignored because it's unknown. So if I wanted to comment out the id attribute from this element:

<input type="text" name="name" id="name">

I would change it to this:

<input type="text" name="name" id_x="name">

This also has the advantage of being able to search for "_x=" to find all commented attributes.

Answer 2

You can't. Comments can only start and end outside tags.

Some people preprend an x to an attribute name, thus changing it and causing it to be all but ignored (since it is still often visible in the DOM), but this is invalid.

Answer 3

The W3C documentation suggests it cannot be done:

Note that comments are markup.

This basically means that a <!-- ...> comment tag is just like any other tag, so <a <!--title="need to be comment out"-->>a link</a> is as wrong as <a <span></span>>a link</a>.

For quick hacking I believe a common option is to rename that attribute. While you obtain invalid HTML you can temporarily remove the attribute:

<a xtitle="need to be comment out">a link</a>

If you happen to be using a server side language, you can also use its own comment syntax. For instance, in PHP you can do this:

<a <?php/*title="need to be comment out"*/?>>a link</a>

... which generates this HTML:

<a >a link</a>

... and in ASP.NET you can use <%-- Comment goes here --%> while the MVC Razor syntax is @* Comment goes here *@

Answer 4

This cannot be done, but an attribute can be removed via the removeAttribute(attribute_name) javascript call.

Alternatively, you can prefix the attributes you want removed with a namespace like <a nosuchns:title="nevershown">click</a> and remove the namespace via javascript.