Alexey, I see your point regarding buttons, but there are many other
cases where an a element seems unnecessary and redundant (as others have
pointed out):
Navigation:
<ul id="main_nav">
<li href="/">Home</li>
<li href="/about/">About</li>
</ul>
clickable images (like a thumbnails gallery)
glossary links: <abbr title="hypertext markup language"
href="/glossary.php#html">html</abbr>
There are, I think, numerous cases like these we encounter every day
where an a is slipped inside another element because that's the only way
to make the link, and the anchor itself serves no other purpose.
From a semantics point of view, the clickablility of an object and the
destination URI of that action is a property of the element itself, and
it makes much more sense to me to use an attribute, rather than a
separate element, for these sorts of cases.
Colin Lieberman
Alexey Feldgendler wrote:
On Fri, 02 Mar 2007 17:55:34 +0100, Colin Lieberman <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
One of the strengths of the current XHTML2 spec is the broadened use of
the href attribute
(http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml2/mod-hyperAttributes.html#adef_hyperAttributes_href)
-- and the resulting requirement for user agents that any element with a
(valid) href element be an actionable link.
Any element can be made into a button, but HTML has the <button> element to
explicitly express the button semantics. I think you won't argue that
<button onclick="...">Calculate</button>
...is preferable than
<span class="button" onclick="...">Calculate</span>
Likewise, HTML has <a> to explicitly express the semantics of a hyperlink. I
don't see how the language would benefit from the ability of turning any element into
a link.
