[html5] Question on label as a part of interactive content

Ian Hickson ian at hixie.ch
Thu Jul 10 12:57:24 PDT 2014


On Wed, 2 Jul 2014, S Partha wrote:
>
> As per the spec 
> http://dev.w3.org/html5/spec-preview/content-models.html#interactive-content, 
> label element is marked as interactive without any exceptions. Label 
> elements are still considered interactive, even if they don't have any 
> labeled control. Is there a specific reason to treat labels this way?

Note that the link above is to a really old W3C copy of the spec. Here's 
the latest:

   http://www.whatwg.org/html#the-label-element

To answer your question, though: it's actually just used as a way to make 
it non-conforming to put <label> elements (even labels without controls) 
inside <button> elements and <a> elements (and a few other minor cases). 
We don't want to allow those because if you ever do associate a control 
with such a label element, the result is very confusing to the user. (And 
if you've not any intention of ever associating a control with the 
<label>, then it's probably wrong to use the <label> in the first place.)

In particular, note that being in the "interactive" category doesn't 
actually affect how the element interacts. That's defined separately.

-- 
Ian Hickson               U+1047E                )\._.,--....,'``.    fL
http://ln.hixie.ch/       U+263A                /,   _.. \   _\  ;`._ ,.
Things that are impossible just take longer.   `._.-(,_..'--(,_..'`-.;.'


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