Shannon schrieb:
With the capabilities of modern browsers it seems to me that a specific
tag for hyperlinks is no longer required or useful and could be
depreciated with a more versatile global "link" attribute. I believe
that hyperlinks now have more in common with attributes such as ONCLICK
than they do with tags since in web applications links often define
actions rather than simply being a part of the document structure. The
<A> tag would continue its role as an anchor but the HREF attribute
would be phased out making <A> a more consistent element (since links
and anchors are really quite separate concepts). Below is an example of
the proposed link attribute in action:
<li><a href="foo.html">Foo</a></li>
could be written as:
<li link="foo.html">Foo</li>
No useful semantic information is lost however the markup is cleaner and
the DOM drops an unnecessary node (which could speed up certain
applications).
I like this idea - this could significantly reduce the amount of
scripting in web pages and applications, and thus increase the
accessibility of hyperlinks.
Anyway, why do you suggest a new attribute rather than making the
existing href attribute global?
<li href="foo.html">Foo</li>
That makes your idea backwards compatible - provided UAs interpret
attributes of unknown tags, they will even be capable to correctly
handle occurrences of <a href> when the A element will be totally
removed from their code.
--
Markus Ernst
