ID's and Classes... The difference is....?

[gregc]

Hello,

I just wanted to ask if there's any difference with ID's and Classes beside's a Class's functionality to work hierarchically with JavaScript.

Are there any advantages IDs have over Classes that I don't know about? What's the official difference, if the Class's JS functionality isn't it?

Thanks,

GregC

[Hierophant]

Simply put it is like this...

ID's are for single elements. If you use the element or formatting once per page then an ID is useful... i.e.

#header {formatting stuff here}
#footer {formetting stuff here}

Classes are useful when you need the same formatting on more than one element such as links or images.
i.e.

.headerlinks {formatting stuff here}
.footerlinks {formatting stuff here}

[Skunk]

In addition, IDs are very handy for using javascript to manipulate your pages via the DOM. If something has a unique ID you can access it by calling document.getElementByID('idtag') where idtag is the ID attribute of the element you wish to access.

[ChrisOSX]

Originally posted by W. Luke
Simply put it is like this...

ID's are for single elements. If you use the element or formatting once per page then an ID is useful... i.e.

#header {formatting stuff here}
#footer {formetting stuff here}

Classes are useful when you need the same formatting on more than one element such as links or images.
i.e.

.headerlinks {formatting stuff here}
.footerlinks {formatting stuff here}

Wow! Is that really correct? I've been under the wrong assumption then. I thought that any ID defined in the page was an extension of the Body definition. In otherwords, my ID tags inherit all the attributes that I define in my Body tag, and can then extend them.

[Hierophant]

If you assign an ID to a span tag and there is no formatting added to SPAN in the CSS, then it will inherit up through the body... This is why it is called Cascading.