[whatwg] href attribute

[Matthew Raymond]

Daniel Glazman 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.
> 
> No, it gives more than that : if |href| becomes global, the usage of
> |a| will decrease and that's a good thing. |a| is a bad element because
> it serves as source AND target of links, because it's not multivalued,

   How is that any different from this?...

| <li id="..." href="..." />

   In the above, it has an |id|, so it can be a destination. It has a
global |href| attribute, so it can be a source. Heck, it can link to
itself for that matter:

| <li id="blah" href="#blah" />

> and I have 5 or six other very good reasons in mind.

   Hope they're better than that last one, especially when you consider
that |name| can't be a global attribute since it's already defined on
form control elements. (Not that I'm a huge fan of |name|. I'm just
pointing out that <a> can't be completely replaced by globalizing its
attributes.)

> Anything we can do
> to prepare a future - in the long term - deprecation of |a| is a good
> thing for the future of HTML.

   I have yet to hear a convincing argument in that regard.
Specifically, I have yet to hear any semantic advantage to a global
|href| attribute. In my eyes, this is all just frivolous markup
restructuring.