[whatwg] href attribute

[Andrew Fedoniouk]

----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Anne van Kesteren" <annevk at opera.com>
To: "Billy Wong" <billyswong at gmail.com>
Cc: "WHATWG" <whatwg at whatwg.org>
Sent: Saturday, March 10, 2007 12:32 AM
Subject: Re: [whatwg] href attribute


> On Sat, 10 Mar 2007 02:28:32 +0100, Billy Wong <billyswong at gmail.com> 
> wrote:
>> Indeed.  IMO, global |href| gives nothing but more confusion.  If we
>> want to have hyperlinks on block-level elements, it is simpler just
>> let <a> and/or other inline elements be legal to wrap block-level
>> elements.
>
> Yup. If I recall correctly parsing-wise it's possible to let <a> contain 
> block level elements. That's being considered now to cater for those use 
> cases.
>
>

Anne, but what about this:

<ul>
   <a><li>....</li></a>
</ul>

it is not about <a> itself.
It should also be a mechanism for the container similar to
CSS's display-model attribute for the container of <a>.
But this is out of influence of HTML per se.

Back to basics:

"A hyperlink is a relationship between two anchors,
called the head and the tail of the hyperlink[DEXTER]. " [1]

Any element is allowed to be a tail of the hyperlink:

"The id attribute may be used to create an anchor at the start tag
of any element (including the A element)." [2]

But I do not understand why we have such a limitation for
the head of the hyperlink.

There are multiple semantically correct cases when
block elements like <li>, <option>, <address> , <img> etc.
*are* hyperlinks. But designers are forced to use
weird tricks to fight with inline nature of <a>s.

Andrew Fedontiouk.
http://terrainformatica.com


[1] http://www.ietf.org/rfc/rfc1866.txt
[2] http://www.w3.org/TR/html401/struct/links.html#h-12.2.3