[whatwg] href on any element

James Graham jg307 at cam.ac.uk
Tue Sep 5 12:38:33 PDT 2006


Keryx webb wrote:

> Will it break backwards compatibility? Yes, if todays browsers are 
> supposed to be able to render WHATWG-pages. But there are lots of other 
> things in WHATWG that they do not understand either. It's only the very 
> latest browsers that can handle canvas. No browser fully implements Web 
> Forms 2.0 (as far as I know).

But there is usually some way to use other HTML5/WF2 features without 
breaking current browsers. The only way I can see to do this with href 
on many elements is to manually walk the DOM inserting <a href="bar" /> 
elements as children of the <foo href="bar" /> elements, with some care 
needed for elements such as <tr> that really won't take <a> as a child. 
Authors doing this would also have to be very careful about not breaking 
their CSS rules etc. in current browsers.

href on multiple elements is a nice idea but I'm not sure the benefits 
outweigh the costs.


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