Re: HTML is a declarative mark-up language

Robert J Burns wrote:
> I would add that even without the legacy baggage it makes a lot of sense 
> to continue to support <a> as a destination anchor. When an author want 
> to make a specific phrase available as a document fragment that is not 
> already wholly and completely enclosed within an element, the author can 
> either use a <span> element or a <a> element. However, the HTML4.01 <a> 
> element  is both more specific (it is supposed to be an 
> anchor—destination in this case) and more compact than <span>. However, 
> this is another case where HTML5 needlessly changes the meaning of an 
> element in the HTML namespace which creates namespace collisions and 
> also removes a valuable meaning of the element that authors had 
> available in HTML5.

I'm confused.  What exactly in HTML5 keeps you from using <a> as the 
element to wrap your fragment?

(Note that doing that might cause parsing issues depending on where it's 
inserted, but that's not new with HTML5; HTML5 just gives you the option 
of avoiding said issues by using <span>, as you point out.)

-Boris