How can I comment an HTML tag attribute in HTML source code?

For example:

<a /*title="need to be comment o开发者_StackOverflow社区ut"*/>a link</a>

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 *@.

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.

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.

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.