On Fri, 02 Mar 2007 18:25:45 +0100, Colin Lieberman <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
wrote:
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>
How is this better than <li><a></a></li>, not taking the amount of typing
into account?
clickable images (like a thumbnails gallery)
This is not really different from "clickable text".
Clickability is a presentational/behavioral property specific to
interactive visual media with a pointing device, but the semantics of
clickable-something is usually "hyperlink" (though sometimes e.g.
"button"). To express hyperlink semantics, we have <a>.
glossary links: <abbr title="hypertext markup language"
href="/glossary.php#html">html</abbr>
For <abbr>, it's probably worth adding the href attribute if the use case
is frequent. The rationale would be that the semantic unit delimited by
<abbr> can be said to have such property as the reference URL to look up
the definition.
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.
Most cases when there are nested <a> and some other element which cover
exactly the same range (<a><other>...</other></a> or
<other><a>...</a></other>) don't deserve merging of <a> and <other>
because it just happens sometimes that the elements cover the same range,
but it could be different. For example, an <a> could cover only part of a
<li> in your example above, or <a> in a gallery item could include both a
thumbnail and a caption below that.
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.
"Clickability" is presentational/behavioral. "Destination URI" has
different semantic meaning when applied to different elements, and no
meaning at all when applied to some (e.g. <input>).
--
Alexey Feldgendler <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
[ICQ: 115226275] http://feldgendler.livejournal.com
