[whatwg] href attribute

[Colin Lieberman]

Hi all.  (Double apologies for accidentally sending that last email 
before finishing it)

My apologies for starting this rather exciting thread. :)

Several commenters (Matthew Raymond comes most prominently to mind) have 
convinced me that while a global href attribute would be handy, it's 
just not worth it:

One of his excellent points is a real clincher for me:

5) Using just an attribute can cause restructuring of markup when you
need to add content to a hyperlink. Let's say you start with this:

| <abbr href="http://w3.org" title="World Wide Web Consortium">
|   W3C
| </abbr>

   Suppose you now want to add the word "Website" to the hyperlink:

| <span href="http://w3.org">
|   <abbr title="World Wide Web Consortium">W3C</abbr> Website
| </span>


That case alone shows the need for an a element.

That said, I think there is a strong case for other element allowing 
links besides a... li and abbr pop to mind.


Daniel Glazman wrote:
> On 11/03/2007 21:30, Anne van Kesteren wrote:
>
>> What does <a href=""><canvas>...</canvas></a> not offer that <canvas 
>> href="">...</canvas> does? 
>
> Code quality... The former is just ugly, really ugly, it smells like
> HTML+ from 1993.
>
> </Daniel>
>