Þann fös 9.sep 2011 19:27, skrifaði Benjamin Hawkes-Lewis:
On Thu, Sep 8, 2011 at 4:58 PM, Bjartur Thorlacius<[email protected]> wrote:
Why use<a> when you have onclick and a settable document.location? :)
I think there are sound reasons to provide user agent conformance
requirements for a@href and to allow it as conforming markup that go
well beyond semantics for semantics sake, including:
1. Links are the essence of the web, so if you're going to express
*any* semantic in a web markup language, you should express links.
True dat.
2. a@href is very common in the web corpus, therefore user agents must
implement a@href to provide access to the existing web corpus.
True for anchors, but irrelevant in a discussion about the introduction
of a new element (or more correctly; new semantics for an element).
3. Making a@href non-conforming would _not_ help authors make their
pages more interoperable.
4. We do not want to make navigating the web dependent on executing
third-party script, since some user agents do not implement scripting
and some users may disable script for usability or security reasons.
Nor should we depend on site stylesheets for rendering documents
beautifully.
5. a@href is a significantly easier to author than any form of scripted link.
This probably being the original reason (simplicity, that is, not being
easily typeable by authors).
6. a@href has built-in accessibility (e.g. keyboard activation, lists
of links in screenreaders, etc.).
Yes, although I believe lists of links to be generally useful, even in
pixmap renderings (as a suggestion list for navigation).
7. Semantic markup is deterministic in a way that arbitrary script is
not. Being able to infer relationships between documents without
executing script makes it much easier for automated agents to make use
of those relationships. For example, Google PageRank delivers
extremely good search results by analysing links expressed through
this simple semantic markup.
This. May I reemphasize again. However genius, Tim Berners-Lee did most
likely not foresee the use case of building a database of links between
documents. Simply butting the information out there, seemingly when
essaying to make documents output medium independent, made creative
analysis of a enormous amount of existing and future to be machine
interpret. Machine readability is a great reason for semantics, even if
seemingly for semantics sake.
