[whatwg] <a onlyreplace>

[Schuyler Duveen]

Tab Atkins Jr. wrote:
> On Sun, Oct 18, 2009 at 11:50 AM, Schuyler Duveen
> <whatwg at graffitiweb.org> wrote:
>> The problem is that people will make links that refresh different parts
>> of a document, to the point that the current document is no longer
>> addressable.  Use cases for this happen often enough (not necessarily
>> good design, but people will do this)
>>
>> In the past, a good way to give (back) addressability to users is with
>> hash tags.  But here, the location changes, and the hash goes away.
>> Standard anchor tags (with no javascript) have generally been
>> addressable to users by default.  When this hasn't been true, like with
>> framesets, lots of confusion and frustration ensues.
>>
>> If this is, in the longterm, going to work non-dynamically, then things
>> should be addressable by default.  It's one of the killer features of
>> the web :-)
> 
> You're right, and this makes me think more strongly that restricting
> the ability to specify the replaceable bits to just <base> is the
> right way to do this.
I'm starting to think the addressability is the main constraint.  What
if the original @onlyreplace anchor tag:

   <a onlyreplace="id1 id2" href="page2.html" />

would be equivalent to something like this:

   <a href="#view(page2.html id1 id2)" />

which would process onload or onhashchange as we've been describing
@onlyreplace and would appear in the browser's location bar.  A more
complicated one (after two jumps) might look something like:

http://example.com/page1.html#view(page2.html id1 id2);view(page3 id3)

/sky