Re: HTML is a declarative mark-up language

At 05:06 PM 1/30/2009 -0600, Robert J Burns wrote:
>>[much discussion about logic of "<a> as anchor" elided...]
>
>Well I don't want to send this off in a tangent to other HTML5 
>problems,  so I'll just say this is up to the author. There are many 
>definitions of important and they don't all mean the "important" intended 
>by the redefinition of the 'strong' element. In this case I simply meant 
>important enough to want to link to the phrase from one or many other 
>documents. So my example is for cases where no other element is suitable 
>to markup the phrase. In fact for cases where the phrase would not even be 
>marked up other than the need for it to serve as the destination anchor of 
>a link relation.

An <a> with only a name attribute is the anchor of a hypertext link. The 
type of link
is anonymous unless it can be discovered by application convention in other 
attribute
values, such as the CLASS attribute. It is useful to deploy anonymous 
anchors at various
stages in the editorial cycle, and other attributes may be employed to 
control behaviour
or record effectivity.

There is no need for us to presume the eventual use to which such elements 
may be put
during a document's development cycle.  That is, no logic compels us to 
remove that
which has been since the beginning and is covered by countless extant texts 
and courses.
Surely we should indicate that name is deprecated in favour of ID, but for 
completeness
we should catalog even the deprecated elements and attributes -- perhaps 
with a link
(so as to reduce clutter) as Ian recently did for the common attributes.

Received on Saturday, 31 January 2009 00:11:28 UTC