On 7/28/2010 6:22 AM, Eduard Pascual wrote:
On Tue, Mar 30, 2010 at 11:44 PM, Christoph Päper
<[email protected]> wrote:
If you think about various syntax variants of wiki systems they’ve got one thing in common that makes
them preferable to direct HTML input: easy links! (Local ones at least, whatever that means.) The
best known example is probably double square brackets as in Mediawiki, the engine that powers the
Wikimediaverse. A link to another article on the same wiki is as simple as “[[Foo]]”, where HTML
would have needed “<a href="Foo">Foo</a>”.
I wonder whether HTML could and should provide some sort of similar shortening, i.e. “<a href>Foo</a>” or even,
just maybe, “<a>Foo</a>”. The UA would append the string content, properly encoded, to the base Web address as
the hyperlink’s target, thus behave as had it encounters “<a href="Foo">Foo</a>”.
I prefer the binary toggle role of the ‘href’ attribute, although it doesn’t work well in the XML serialisation, because it provides
better compatibility with existing content and when I see or write “<a>Bar</a>” I rather think of the origin of that element
name, ‘anchor’. So I expect it to be equivalent to “<a id>Bar</a>” and “<a name>Bar</a>” which would be shortcuts
for “<a id="Bar">Bar</a>”.
PS: Square brackets aren’t that simple actually, because on many keyboard
layouts they’re not easy to input and might not be found on keytops at all.
PPS: The serialisation difference is not that important, because XML, unlike
HTML, isn’t intended to be written by hand anyway.
Can't this be handled with CSS' generated content? I'm not sure if
I'll be getting the syntax right, but I think something like this:
a[href]:empty { content: attr(href); }
would pull the href from every empty<a> that has such attribute (so
it doesn't mess with anchor-only elements) and render it as the
content of the element. Note that href attributes are resolved
relative to what your<base>s define (this is slightly better than
just "appending", since it makes '../whatever'-style URLs work the
right way), so you don't need to (rather, should not) use absolute
URLs for such links.
It seems that you are only concerned about avoiding duplication of
content for the href and the content of the element. Your proposal
puts the stuff on the content, while the CSS-based solution would put
it on the href; but both put it only once.
While it is a creative solution, something as basic as content of an
href should not depend on CSS... CSS content is supposed to be reserved
for decorative content.
I for one like the abbreviated syntax; a lot of times one does wish to
make the link visible. I imagine the web would be full of such links.
Abbreviating to <a>...</a> wouldn't work as an abbrev for <a href> as
the former is still used for anchors.
Brett
