[whatwg] href attribute

[Andrew Fedoniouk]

----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Matthew Raymond" <mattraymond at earthlink.net>
To: "Andrew Fedoniouk" <news at terrainformatica.com>
Cc: "WHATWG" <whatwg at whatwg.org>
Sent: Saturday, March 10, 2007 7:17 PM
Subject: Re: [whatwg] href attribute


> Andrew Fedoniouk wrote:
>> Back to basics:
>> 
>> "A hyperlink is a relationship between two anchors,
>> called the head and the tail of the hyperlink[DEXTER]. " [1]
> 
>   This is not a definition of the <a> element. In fact, <a> is defined
> as a anchor, not a hyperlink.

I think "hyperlink" is better in any sense 
than "anchor" as a designation of this entity.

> 
>   By contrast, the |href| attribute "specifies the location of a Web
> resource". Thus, using |href| for hyperlinks on other elements is an
> alteration of the attribute's semantics, because the element you put
> them on doesn't have the semantics of a source anchor.
> 
>> 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]
> 
>   While one could argue that the |id| element give anchor semantics to
> an element, it is clear that in this context the text implicitly refers
> to the semantics of a DESTINATION anchor, not a source anchor. Even if
> you were to ignore this context, it would mean that using |href| as a
> global attribute would ALWAYS require you to include an |id| attribute
> on the element.
> 
>> But I do not understand why we have such a limitation for
>> the head of the hyperlink.
> 
>   The definition of <a> as inline is the only limitation in HTML I'm
> aware of. Everything else is a CSS issue, and we should generally avoid
> making fundamental alterations to HTML purely to achieve presentational
> ends.
> 
>> There are multiple semantically correct cases when
>> block elements like <li>, <option>, <address> , <img> etc.
>> *are* hyperlinks.
> 
>   Actually, by the definition you quoted, they're not hyperlinks and
> can never be hyperlinks because a hyperlink is a relationship. In HTML
> 4.01, they can't even be source anchors. The HTML 4.01 version of |href|
> doesn't have the semantics to make them source anchors even if you made
> the attribute global.
> 
>   So let's be clear that what you're talking about is making every
> element semantically an <a> element. In other words, every element would
> automatically be a source anchor. Thus, you have taken semantics that
> were explicitly represented by an element and made them implicit and
> invisible in the markup. This is a poor way of dealing with semantics
> that are at the very heart of the World Wide Web, and I would certainly
> not call it "semantically correct".
> 
>> But designers are forced to use
>> weird tricks to fight with inline nature of <a>s.
> 
>   That issue can be addressed without getting rid of <a>, by either
> allowing <a> to contain block-levels, or by creating a new block-level
> container with equivalent semantics.
>

I beleive that you and me have different interpretation of 
the term 'semantic'. 

For my semantic any HTML element that has 
"href" attribute is not anyhow different from the <a> element
with href. 
If I see <li href="..."> I recognize that this is a list item that
leads somewhere. Exactly (and even better) as 
<li><a href="...">...</a></li> 

For different tools it also does not matter what to use:

getElementsBySelector(":link") or 
getElementsBySelector("a:link") or 
getElementsBySelector("[href]") or 
whatever.

In any case not all <a>'s are hyperlinks so 
for your meaning of semantic they should also not be 
automatically hyperlinks (or anchors if you wish).  

I am pretty sure that existence of 'href' attribute is 
what creates semantic meaning of <a> for you. 
So why <a> cannot be <b href> or <c href>?

Andrew Fedoniouk.
http://terrainformatica.com