Do HTML5 custom data attributes “work” in IE 6?

Question

Custom data attributes: http://dev.w3.org/html5/spec/Overview.html#embedding-custom-non-visible-data

When I say “work”, I mean, if I’ve got HTML like this:

<div id="geoff" data-geoff="geoff de geoff">

will the following JavaScript:

var geoff = document.getElementById('geoff');
alert(geoff.dataGeoff);

produce, in IE 6, an alert with “geoff de geoff” in it?

Answer 1

I think IE has always supported this (at least starting from IE4) and you can access them from JS. They were called 'expando properties'. See old MSDN article

This behaviour can be disabled by setting the expando attribute to false on a DOM element (it's true by default, so the expando attributes work by default).

Edit: fixed the URL

Answer 2

You can retrieve values of custom (or your own) attributes using getAttribute. Following your example with

<div id="geoff" data-geoff="geoff de geoff">

I can get the value of data-geoff using

var geoff = document.getElementById("geoff");
alert(geoff.getAttribute("data-geoff"));

See MSDN. And although it is mentioned there that you need IE7 to get this to work, I tested this a while ago with IE6 and it functioned correctly (even in quirks mode).

But this has nothing to do with HTML5-specific attributes, of course.