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HTML attributes are special words used inside the opening tag to control the element's behaviour. It is a piece of markup language used to adjust the behavior or display of an HTML element.HTML attributes are a modifier of a HTML element type.
HTML is a markup language that web browsers use to interpret and compose text, images, and other material into visible or audible web pages. Default characteristics for every item of HTML markup are defined in the browser, and these characteristics can be altered or enhanced by the web page designer's additional use of CSS.
HTML attributes define desired behavior or indicate additional element properties. Most attributes require a value. In HTML, the value can be left unquoted if it does not include spaces (attribute=value), or it can be quoted with single or double quotes (attribute='value' or attribute="value"). In XML, those quotes are required.
In SGML, HTML and XML documents, the logical constructs known as character data and attribute values consist of sequences of characters, in which each character can manifest directly (representing itself), or can be represented by a series of characters called a character reference, of which there are two types: a numeric character reference and a character entity reference.
Incorrect HTML entity escaping may also open up security vulnerabilities for injection attacks such as cross-site scripting. If HTML attributes are left unquoted, certain characters, most importantly whitespace, such as space and tab, must be escaped using entities. Other languages related to HTML have their own methods of escaping characters.
For these reasons, and in support of a more semantic web, attributes attached to elements within HTML should describe their semantic purpose, rather than merely their intended display properties in one particular medium.
The Web Hypertext Application Technology Working Group (WHATWG) began work on the new standard in 2004. At that time, HTML 4.01 had not been updated since 2000, [10] and the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) was focusing future developments on XHTML 2.0.
The alt attribute is the HTML attribute used in HTML and XHTML documents to specify alternative text (alt text) that is to be displayed in place of an element that cannot be rendered. The alt attribute is used for short descriptions, with longer descriptions using the longdesc attribute .