title: Html/Javascript: Add Attribute to an HTML Control
body: <p>Need: Find a way to add a valid tag/attribute/property to a normal html control.</p>
  
  <p>What I have is some javascript/jquery adding a click event to a link that will show or hide a div.  The idea is to do this using $(document).ready and an anonymous method to create the method called by onClick at the page load.  When clicked, a div will be shown with some text.  This is all well and good except I can't figure out how to set up the text so that this can be done on the page load.  What I'd like is something like:</p>
  
  <pre><code>&lt;a href="..." class="showItLink" textToShow="This is the text to show"&gt;HI&lt;/a&gt;
  </code></pre>
  
  <p>so that I can do this:</p>
  
  <pre><code>$(document).ready
  (
    function()
    {
      $("..showItLink").click
      (
        function(event) 
        {
          var containerPosition;
          var createdDiv;
  
          //see if the div already exists
          createdDiv = $(this).children(".postComment");
  
          if (createdDiv.length == 0) 
          {
            //This is where the attribute is used so that the CreateDiv
            //method can take the textToShow and fill the div's innerText
            //with it                  V V V V V V
            createdDiv = CreateDiv(this.textToShow, "postComment"); 
            $(this).append(createdDiv);
            $(this).children(".postComment").hide();
          }
  
          $(createdDiv).toggle();
          event.preventDefault();
        }
      );
    }
  );
  </code></pre>
  
  <p>Now besides not being xhtml valid (meh), this only works in IE.  Firefox just says it doesn't exist. (this.textToShow)  I could use something like rel or rev, but that seems just as hackish.  I was wondering if there is a valid way of doing this.</p>
  
  <p><strong>Solution from answer below</strong></p>
  
  <pre><code>comment = $(".showItLink").attr("comment");
  ...
  createdDiv = CreateDiv(comment, "postComment");
  </code></pre>
  
  <p>Paired with:</p>
  
  <pre><code>&lt;a href="http://www.theironical.com" class="showItLink" comment="hihihi" &gt;HI&lt;/a&gt;
  </code></pre>