

RE: HTML Improvement/Suggestion

From: Jukka K. Korpela <jkorpela@cs.tut.fi>
Date: Mon, 12 Dec 2005 12:49:24 +0200 (EET)
To: www-html@w3.org
Message-ID: <Pine.GSO.4.63.0512121236110.14136@korppi.cs.tut.fi>

On Mon, 12 Dec 2005, Anne van Kesteren wrote:

> XHTML 2.0 introduced a way so any element could be a
> hyperlink and any element could embed some document/image.

XHTML 2.0 didn't do anything, yet. There is no XHTML 2.0. There is just a 
sketchy draft for an XHTML 2.0 specification, saying that "it is 
inappropriate to cite this document as other than 'work in progress.'"

It's the seventh public draft, and there seems to be little progress.

The idea you mention is probably one of the worst ideas: in the 
theoretical approach of making linking ubiquous, it breaks the link 
concept. It is _good_ to restrict link syntax so that there is a short 
link text (inline textual content). Generalizations break the idea instead 
of making things more flexible. What will a list of links look like if a 
"link" can be any element, including the root element? Similar 
considerations apply to embedding.

> From a "semantic"
> point of view |<a href="">| is not really any different from |<span href="">|
> (same for html:object) so I don't see the point in keeping html:a and
> html:object.

Well, the difference between <a href ...> and <span href ...> would be 
that the former is known to exist for the purpose of linking, while the 
latter could be anything, being a link just as an aside perhaps.

The logical and practical approach - assuming that continuity with 
existing HTML usage is to be broken - would be to define a link as
<link ref="...">...</link>, getting rid of the absurdly cryptic
names "a" and "href". Similarly,
<image source="..."><caption>...</caption>...</image>

Received on Monday, 12 December 2005 10:49:38 GMT
