For example:
<a /*title="need to be comment out"*/>a link</a>
4 Answers
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 ASP.NET MVC Razor syntax is @* Comment goes here *@.
3 Comments
Matthew Wilcoxson
You might want to make it more obvious you have purposely "commented" the attribute out. For instance with comment_out_title="...". It may be assumed to be a mispelling.
trysis
You do not obtain invalid HTML if you use
data- attributes, for example, <a data-xtitle="need to be comment out">a link</a>, though many best practices, including those by such big frameworks as Angular, disadvise this.trysis
A minor thing, but in PHP, you can remove the space, as well, with, for example,
<a<? php /* title="need to be comment out"*/ ?>>a link</a>.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.
3 Comments
Intrepidis
Obviously this trick should only be used when developing and "commented" attributes shouldn't be left in production code.
anisanwesley
nice, i use just
-id="name"
nmg49
@ChrisNash In general, commented out HTML shouldn't be left in code.
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.
1 Comment
Nick Perkins
Yes, this is super-easy, I also do this to "comment" bits of CSS. I call it "spoiling" the line.
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.
Comments
//) were also enabled by this.<!): Does HTML5 change the standard for HTML commenting?