On Tue, 2010-03-30 at 23:44 +0200, Christoph Päper wrote: > If you think about various syntax variants of wiki systems they’ve got one > thing in common that makes them preferable to direct HTML input: easy links! > (Local ones at least, whatever that means.) The best known example is > probably double square brackets as in Mediawiki, the engine that powers the > Wikimediaverse. A link to another article on the same wiki is as simple as > “[[Foo]]”, where HTML would have needed “<a href="Foo">Foo</a>”. > > I wonder whether HTML could and should provide some sort of similar > shortening, i.e. “<a href>Foo</a>” or even, just maybe, “<a>Foo</a>”. The UA > would append the string content, properly encoded, to the base Web address as > the hyperlink’s target, thus behave as had it encounters “<a > href="Foo">Foo</a>”. > > I prefer the binary toggle role of the ‘href’ attribute, although it doesn’t > work well in the XML serialisation, because it provides better compatibility > with existing content and when I see or write “<a>Bar</a>” I rather think of > the origin of that element name, ‘anchor’. So I expect it to be equivalent to > “<a id>Bar</a>” and “<a name>Bar</a>” which would be shortcuts for “<a > id="Bar">Bar</a>”. > > PS: Square brackets aren’t that simple actually, because on many keyboard > layouts they’re not easy to input and might not be found on keytops at all. > PPS: The serialisation difference is not that important, because XML, unlike > HTML, isn’t intended to be written by hand anyway.
I think to me <a>foo</a> would indicate it is a named anchor in a page. Are all UA's intelligent enough to be able to accurately recognise any form of URL? Also, in XHTML the tag would look like <a href="href">foo</a>. And, shouldn't links be as semantic as possible? Consider these two: * find the latest spec at <a href="http://www.somespecsite.com">http://www.somespecsite.com</a> * get <a href="http://www.somespecsite.com">the latest spec</a> In my opinion, the second one is far more semantic, and is what I prefer to use on anything I put together. The HTML spec should encourage the best practices, and making shorter link tags that actually take a step backwards in the world of semantic markup just seems a little foolish. Thanks, Ash http://www.ashleysheridan.co.uk