Re: Selectors Tests

On Nov 12, 2008, at 7:44 AM, Aryeh Gregor wrote:

> On Wed, Nov 12, 2008 at 10:01 AM, Philip TAYLOR (Ret'd)
> <P.Taylor@rhul.ac.uk> wrote:
>> Before retiring as webmaster at Royal Holloway, University of London,
>> we certainly had disabled links in some iterations of the site.  The
>> classic case was the need to differentiate (in a jump table menu)
>> between the current page (to which jumping would serve no purpose)
>> and the set of target pages that were not the current page.  I  
>> imagine
>> that this is by no means rare in real life.
>
> Certainly not.  You can see it on practically any website, e.g.,  
> Wikipedia:
>
> http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Main_Page&action=history
>
> Notice how "Latest" and "newer 50" at the bottom are non-linked, as is
> "(cur)" for the top revision.  Also, any link to the current article
> is automatically turned into a <span class="selflink">, which is
> bolded.
>
> But do these match the semantics of :disabled?  :disabled implies to
> me that the user might take some action to enable the object.  In
> these cases, the link is semantically unwanted under all
> circumstances, in the current context.

In my case, I used the styled link in exactly the same way that submit  
buttons are used: to look like a button and submit a form. It had an  
"onclick" handler that pointed to the same function used by the  
"onsubmit" of the form, and the link returned false to the link action  
of the href. So, when I needed the button-like link to be disabled, it  
was in exactly the same sort of situations where someone would want to  
disable a "submit" input.