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Sometimes when it’s false, it’s true

Posted in Development and HTML

A short posts on boolean attributes in HTML. What’s a boolean attribute? Something that can only be true or false false; things like:

They either are reversed, checked or disabled, or they’re not.

The funny thing about booleans in HTML is that they’re true if they exist. So even if the value is false (like required="false") it’s still true!

In fact, it doesn’t matter what value a boolean attribute is given: required="true", required="false", and required="banana" do the same thing.

You can go one step further an remove the value altogether, leaving just required, and that’s what I do. It differentiates a boolean nicely from other attributes like class and src.

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More posts

Here are a couple more posts for you to enjoy. If that’s not enough, have a look at the full list.

  1. Booleans in ARIA

    HTML booleans are bit quirky but, as if just to complicate things, booleans in ARIA work slightly differently. It’s worth knowing how and why.

  2. Alt text for CSS generated content

    There’s an interesting feature in Safari 17.4 that allows content added with CSS to have ‘alt’ text. I’m not sure how I feel about this.