Can an html element have multiple ids?

html xhtml standards-compliance
webmat picture webmat · Oct 10, 2008 · Viewed 358.3k times · Source

I understand that an id must be unique within an HTML/XHTML page.

My question is, for a given element, can I assign multiple ids to it?

<div id="nested_element_123 task_123"></div>

I realize I have an easy solution with simply using a class. I'm just curious about using ids in this manner.

Answer

timmow picture timmow · Oct 10, 2008

No. From the XHTML 1.0 Spec

In XML, fragment identifiers are of type ID, and there can only be a single attribute of type ID per element. Therefore, in XHTML 1.0 the id attribute is defined to be of type ID. In order to ensure that XHTML 1.0 documents are well-structured XML documents, XHTML 1.0 documents MUST use the id attribute when defining fragment identifiers on the elements listed above. See the HTML Compatibility Guidelines for information on ensuring such anchors are backward compatible when serving XHTML documents as media type text/html.

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