Attribute

What Does Attribute Mean?

In general, an attribute is a characteristic. In HTML, an attribute is a characteristic of a page element, such as font size or color. Attributes are used to amplify a tag. When a Web browser interprets an HTML tag, it will also look for its attributes so that it can display the Web page’s elements properly.

Techopedia Explains Attribute

Attributes provide additional information about HTML elements. For example, HTML links are defined by the a tag. The link address is specified in the “href” attribute. Note that HTML attributes are always enclosed in quotes.

HTML attributes have a few key characteristics:

Attributes provide more information about HTML elements
Attributes are always specified in the start tag
Attributes are presented in name/value pairs such as: name=value

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Margaret Rouse

Technology expert

Margaret is an award-winning writer and educator known for her ability to explain complex technical topics to a non-technical business audience. Over the past twenty years, her IT definitions have been published by Que in an encyclopedia of technology terms and cited in articles in the New York Times, Time Magazine, USA Today, ZDNet, PC Magazine, and Discovery Magazine. She joined Techopedia in 2011. Margaret’s idea of a fun day is to help IT and business professionals to learn to speak each other’s highly specialized languages.

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