[whatwg] href attribute

[Anne van Kesteren]

On Sun, 11 Mar 2007 06:03:02 +0100, Daniel Glazman  
<daniel.glazman at disruptive-innovations.com> wrote:
>> 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>?
>
> Let me also play the devil (I love it) : a feature is not trashable
> only because it comes from XHTML 2.0 :-)

I agree. One of the reasons HTML5 has <section> and redefined <h1>-<h6>.


> Here, a global href is a really cool idea, we should have done it in
> HTML 4 but we were too blind to see.

What are the problems it solves? To my mind introducing it will just break  
compatibility and complicate implementations for no apparent benefit. You  
also get to deal with silly cases like:

   <input type=checkbox href=http://www.opera.com/>


HTML5 already redefines <a> to be hyperlink or a placeholder for one (this  
should address your concern raised in another e-mail). The idea of <a  
name=""> is not mentioned in the draft and isn't even conforming (although  
I suppose user agents will be required to support it). Any element can be  
a link target much like in HTML4.


-- 
Anne van Kesteren
<http://annevankesteren.nl/>
<http://www.opera.com/>