[whatwg] adding microdata to basic links

[Tab Atkins Jr.]

On Wed, Aug 24, 2011 at 10:02 AM, Stéphane Corlosquet
<scorlosquet at gmail.com> wrote:
> Starting from a basic markup like this:
> [[[
> This book has been authored by <a href="http://smith.org/john">John
> Smith</a>.
> ]]]
>
> I would like to markup both the textContent of the link ("John Smith") and
> the url from the href attribute.
>
> In RDFa this is done by adding a couple of attributes to the a element. It
> would read like this:
> [[[
> This book has been authored by <a property="name" rel="url" href="
> http://smith.org/john">John Smith</a>.
> ]]]
>
> Is there any way to do the same in microdata without adding a new HTML
> element to the markup?

No, Microdata purposely keeps its data model simple by expressing
property names through a single attribute.  Since having @itemprop on
an <a> always refers to the @href of the element, you must nest an
additional element, such as a <span>, into your markup to carry the
property that refers to the text content.

~TJ