[whatwg] href synonyms?

[Ian Hickson]

On Thu, 28 Apr 2011, David Dailey wrote:
>
> There are likewise annoying things in SVG. xlink:href="#Q" , 
> attributeName="url(#Q)" etc. Every time I go to use a gradient, a 
> pattern, a use, a filter, a clipPath, or a mask, I have to look up, in 
> the manual, which notation happens to be used for this particular thing. 
> I'm sure there may have been historic logic, but the pain for the 
> developer results in lost productivity. Agreed that developers would 
> still need to know an antiquated illogic, but over time, wouldn't the 
> world become a better place?
> 
> 400 hours of implementers' time now is probably hard to justify, 
> perhaps, given that the return on this investment would come in zillions 
> of developers' microseconds harvested over years.

The problem is that it probably wouldn't make people's lives better. In 
practice, when we've introduced redundant features in the past, it has 
just increased the overall complexity of the system. New bugs, new 
incompatibilities, new concerns over handling legacy UAs, new things to 
learn when maintaining old pages, etc. It's a significant cost overall.

-- 
Ian Hickson               U+1047E                )\._.,--....,'``.    fL
http://ln.hixie.ch/       U+263A                /,   _.. \   _\  ;`._ ,.
Things that are impossible just take longer.   `._.-(,_..'--(,_..'`-.;.'