Jonas Sicking wrote:
Ian Hickson wrote:
Every now and then, the issue of a global href="" attribute for all
elements comes up. There are many valid use cases for this, like being
able to make all cells in a table row act like a link, or making a
banner ad act like a single block of a link.
Unfortunately, I've been told over and over by implementers that a
global href="" is a bad idea, and at the end of the day, the
implementors are the ones who have the final say, so that's just a
non-starter.
Which implementations have you heard this from? As far as mozilla goes
we would have no technical problems implementing this.
The problems that I can see are of a more 'social' type. I.e. how to
behave when two links are nested, or when a button is nested inside a
link. Or how the event model interacts with the navigation action.
All these problems exist already, but might become more common if it was
easier to sprinkle 'href' attributes throughout the DOM.
Actually, I think I spoke a bit too broadly.
Just adding support for the 'href' content attribute, and the ability to
click and style those elements just like you can an <a> today should be
easy, at least in gecko.
This is modulo the issue of what happens with the elements that already
have a 'href' attribute with a different meaning (i.e. other than making
the element into a clickable link), such as <base> and <link>
However if we want to add support for the long list of JS attributes
that exist on <a> elements today on each and every HTML element I
suspect that is going to get messier. Especially considering the
collisions for <base> and <link>. What would myBaseElement.accessKey do?
And is myDivElement.protocol really intuitive what it does?
However these are problems that can be solved on a spec level IMHO.
/ Jonas
