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

[Jukka K. Korpela]

2014-07-10 22:57, Ian Hickson wrote:
> 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.

So <label> is not allowed inside <a>. I wonder why it is allowed to nest 
them the other way, since the argument looks equally strong for it.

This came into my mind when reading the question
http://stackoverflow.com/questions/24755802/a-link-inside-a-label-also-triggers-the-checkbox-how-to-prevent
where the code is:

|<label><input  type="checkbox">  I agree to the<a  href="terms">terms</a>  and would like to continue</label>|

This creates obvious problems (the checkbox is toggled when following 
the link, in most browsers). Disallowing <a> inside <label> (if 
implemented in validators) would help to avoid such problems.

-- 
Yucca, http://www.cs.tut.fi/~jkorpela/