Using HTML data-attribute to set CSS background-image url

StephenKelzer picture StephenKelzer · Mar 31, 2013 · Viewed 107.6k times · Source

I plan on building a custom photo gallery for a friend and I know exactly how I am going to be producing the HTML, however I am running into a small issue with the CSS.
(I would prefer to not have the page styling rely on jQuery if possible)


My question regards:
Data-Attribute in HTML
Background-image in CSS
I am using this format for my html thumbnails:
<div class="thumb" data-image-src="images/img.jpg"></div>

and I assume the CSS should look something like this:

.thumb {
    width:150px;
    height:150px;
    background-position:center center;
    overflow:hidden;
    border:1px solid black;

    background-image: attr(data-image-src);/*This is the question piece*/
}


My goal is to take the data-image-src from the div.thumb in my HTML file and use it for each div.thumb(s) background-image source in my CSS file.

Here is a Codepen Pen in order to get a dynamic example of what I am looking for:
http://codepen.io/thestevekelzer/pen/rEDJv

Answer

user663031 picture user663031 · Aug 25, 2013

You will eventually be able to use

background-image: attr(data-image-src url);

but that is not implemented anywhere yet to my knowledge. In the above, url is an optional "type-or-unit" parameter to attr(). See https://drafts.csswg.org/css-values/#attr-notation.