Re: [XHTML2] Poor little old <a>

Matt Fletcher wrote:

> If this sort of nesting behavior for
> > links was resticted to 
> > just <a> then it would give a reason for <a> to
> > still exist besides 
> > historical sentiment.
> 
> Why restrict it to just <a>? I still see no
> reason for keeping <a> when any other element
> could be nested and linked from?

A restriction to just <a> might be of benefit in that it might make it 
easier for user agents to implement (or it might not, I haven't written 
a browser this week :) Unless some aspect of hyperlinking is restricted 
to the <a> element, I agree that there is no reason for maintaining <a> 
as an element in XHTML2. I do wonder if the extremely orthogonal 
attribute model (where almost all attributes are used on almost all 
elements that XHTML2 is using will prove to be too much of a burden 
tho. The Hypertext attributes could be restricte to just <a> and <link> 
while the embedding attributes could be restricted to just <object> and 
equivalent documents with the same functionality could be obtained.  A 
comparison with RISC and CISC would be apt I think, but I can't think 
of a good one to make just now.