[whatwg] Anchor target-attribute extension to enable dom targeting

Georges MARZIN gmarzin at club-internet.fr
Sun Apr 8 11:17:55 PDT 2007


Hello.

This is my first post in whatwg mailing list for technical discussion of
WHAT Working Group specifications.

Please pardon my english, I'm french. 

I have a suggestion to submit : 
Look at this piece of code : 

     <!-- look at the sharp in the target property --> 

     <a href="inc/foo.frg" target="#main_area"> 
         Click here to dynamicaly load a text/html piece of code into 
the "main_area" identified dom node 
     </a> 

     <!-- somewhere in the same document --> 
     <div id="main_area"></div> 

The content of inc/foo.frg in not a complete html page but only a well 
formed xhtml piece of code like : 

    <div> 
       this content is dynamically loaded into a dom node, like ajax,
       but with a html extended syntax of the target property.
    </div> 

- With this extension of the target attribute, it might be possible to 
make some "ajax" kind of work without javascript enable. 
- Second: developers don't need to know anything about
xmlHttpRequest.   
- Third avantage: with this syntaxe, a robot can parse the href content 
to indexe it. Remember that html purist don't like ajax because it use 
javascript and is not indexable by robots. 

It is possible to do the same with the target attribute of <form>
element. 
So the result of submission will appear in a dom element and not cover
the whole page.

Here is an example : 
http://lomago.com/xhtarget/formulaire.html

For french readers, a demo : 
http://lomago.com/xhtarget





More information about the whatwg mailing list