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Attributes modify the behavior or appearance of an HTML element. They allow you to control styles, link destinations, and other properties. An element with attributes generally looks like this:

<name attribute1="value1" attribute2="value2" ... >
  ... content or other elements ...
</name>

• attribute: The name of the attribute you want to apply. Attribute names are case-insensitive: STYLE, style, and sTyLE all work the same.

• value: The specific setting for the attribute. Case may matter depending on the attribute. For example, URLs are case-sensitive on some servers.

For example, you can use the style attribute to control the background color of a webpage, as in “Changing the Background Color”. Here’s another common example, the href attribute:

<a href="https://www.yahoo.com">Go to Yahoo!</a>

The a element (anchor) creates a hyperlink. The href attribute specifies the link destination. Clicking the “Go to Yahoo!” link will open Yahoo! in your browser.

Rules for Attributes

• Elements can have multiple attributes. The order of attributes doesn’t matter.
• Each element allows only certain attributes. You cannot freely assign any attribute to any element.
• Whitespace between attributes is ignored. You can use spaces, tabs, or line breaks to make your code more readable:

<a href="https://www.gutenberg.org" style="background: yellow">Public Domain Books</a>

• Attribute values are usually case-sensitive. For example:

<a href="https://www.cnn.com/index.php">Go to CNN</a>

<a href="HTTPS://WWW.CNN.COM/INDEX.PHP">Go to CNN</a>

The second link may not work correctly because URLs can be case-sensitive.

• Always quote attribute values, especially if they contain spaces or special characters. For example, href="https://example.com/my page.html".
• Browsers ignore incorrect attributes. Misspelled attribute names or invalid values have no effect. For example, hhref or backgrounde: yellow will be ignored, but a mistyped URL may cause a link to fail.