# Alpine.js Documentation - Directives

Alpine directives are attributes that you can add to HTML elements to give them special behavior.

## [x-ignore](/directives/ignore)

By default, Alpine will crawl and initialize the entire DOM tree of an element containing `x-init` or `x-data`.

If for some reason, you don't want Alpine to touch a specific section of your HTML, you can prevent it from doing so using `x-ignore`.

```
<div x-data="{ label: 'From Alpine' }">


n<div x-ignore>


n<span x-text="label"></span>


n</div>


n</div>
```

In the above example, the `<span>` tag will not contain "From Alpine" because we told Alpine to ignore the contents of the `div` completely.

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