[whatwg] Proposal for a link attribute to replace <a href>

[Kristof Zelechovski]

By the current spec, the Anchor element is phrasing content, which is a
special case of flow content.  Did you mean "transparent content" instead?
EC! I cannot see any "inline content" in HTML5, at least not in 3.4.1 where
content models are defined.
Chris

-----Original Message-----
From: Ian Hickson [mailto:ian at hixie.ch] 
Sent: Wednesday, July 30, 2008 1:50 PM
Cc: WhatWG
Subject: Re: [whatwg] Proposal for a link attribute to replace <a href>


On Sun, 1 Jun 2008, Ernest Cline wrote:
> 
> Backwards compatible with some user agents but not with the specs.  The 
> following fragment has never been valid according to the specs in any of 
> HTML 1.0, 2.0, 3.2, or 4, or the current draft of HTML 5, despite <a>, 
> <h3>, and <p> appearing in all of them.
> 
> <a href="foo.html">
>  <h3>Heading</h3>
>  <p>Text</p>
> </a>
> 
> The specs have always called for <a> to only have inline content save 
> that for some reason, HTML 2.0 did allow <h1> to <h6> inside <a> though 
> that was not recommended, and that was reverted back to inline only in 
> 3.2.
> 
> While changing the specs to match user agent behavior is a possibility, 
> it is not one that should be taken lightly. (Nor should adding a new 
> flow content hyperlink element, be taken lightly either.)

Changing the specs to match user agent behavior is the whole way HTML5 
works, so that's not a big problem. The problem is that the current parse 
model results in odd behaviour if we allow <a> as a flow-content element.