On Mon, 11 Apr 2005, Anne van Kesteren wrote:
Ian Hickson wrote:
Anyone want us to keep <a coords="">?
The reason I especially liked it was:
<object data="foo" usemap="#foo"> <map id="foo"> <ul> <li><a coords="...">...</a> ...
Yup, it is indeed nice; if image maps had been designed that way from the start it would make sense. But it's not _that_ much nicer than <area>, which we could define as allowing:
<object data="foo" usemap="#foo"> <map id="foo"> <ul> <li><area coords="..." href="..."><a href="...">...</a> ...
...which isn't much worse, and has the very important benefit of actually working in IE6.
This would seem to undermine your position with regards to using the <a> element for menu labels:
| <menubar id="appmenu"> | <a href="#file">File</a> | <menu>
Contrast this with the following:
| <menubar id="appmenu"> | <menulabel><a href="#file">File</a></menulabel> | <menu>
It's essentially the same scenario. In both situations, <a> is being used in a situation where alternative, more semantically appropriate markup already exists for the purposes of fallback. However, as illustrated in both your example and mine, <a> could simply be used within the same alternative markup to create fallback without overloading the semantics of <a>.
So, with implementations of <a coords=""> existing and gaining marketshare, why is <a coords=""> being phased out while <a href="#[menu]"> for use _within_ menus is being phased in?
