jquery - Is it alright to add custom Html attributes?

Question

I have a site I'm working on where I want to mark if a row of data has been changed. If something has been changed in that row I would mark it with a custom attribute like so.

<tr>
  <td isDirty="true">
     ....row data
  <td>
</tr>

This works great with jQuery and it doesn't add to much code to my page.

But is this really the correct way of doing something like this and what are the downsides?

I guess another way of doing this would be like this, but it seems like over kill.

<tr>
  <td>
     ....row data
     <input id="isDirty" type="hidden" value="true" />
  <td>
</tr>

Answer 1

Why don't you use the jQuery data capability?

Your example will be (I don't know the condition to select proper td):

$("tr td").data("isDirty", true);

take a look at documentation