documenting div sections, use title attribute?

I'm looking for the most terse way to document sections of my page, e.g. div sections.

Anything wrong with using the title attribute, e.g.

<div title="Payment Area" class="form">
   ...
</div>

?

P.S. In case relevant, I'm using the IntelliJ IDE, but new to its various capabilities, e.g. automatic formatting control and other ways to be able to easily understand sections of开发者_C百科 my pages.

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If an element has a title attribute, most browsers show a tooltip with the attribute’s value when you hover over it. In this case, they’ll show a “Payment Area” tooltip when you hover anywhere over that div.

HTML attributes, in general, have a purpose. HTML has comments for documentation! Try them:

<div class="form"> <!-- Payment Area -->
    ...
</div>

You mentioned that you didn't want the overhead of comments. If you count up the characters (including the required space before the attribute, they're actually the same length:

 title="Payment Area"
<!-- Payment Area -->

(But, I agree, they do look bigger!)

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I would probably use ids, that way you can also use them as hooks for your CSS and JavaScript.

Otherwise, Gabe's Answer makes a good case for data attributes. John Resig explains why they are good here: http://ejohn.org/blog/html-5-data-attributes/

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I would recommend using the HTML5 custom attributes standard:

<div data-title='Payment Area'></div>

Basically, precede the name with data- and the browser will ignore it.

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The title attribute isn't meant for divs - I haven't checked the official specs, but I don't think it's even a supported attribute. The better practice is to use the "id" attribute. This has the added benefit of providing hooks for your CSS.

You can also take it a step further and use html5, which provides you with more descriptive elements such as <nav>, <section>, <article> and <header>

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Edit: as per comment by steveax, the title attribute isn't invalid. I think the gist of my answer remains valid, though.

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You can use the rel="" attribute, that works pretty well for me, I don't think title works on divs

<div rel="Payment Area"></div>