Re: HTML is a declarative mark-up language

Hi Murray,

On Jan 30, 2009, at 6:11 PM, Murray Maloney wrote:

>
> 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.


I'm not clear where you're coming from in this thread. I agree with  
everything you said here, but this is also what I have been saying  
throughout the thread. The point Leif and I have been making in this  
thread is that the current HTML5 draft seems to preclude this use of  
the 'a' element requiring authors to instead use the 'span' element  
(since the draft implies that 'a' is only for link sources and not  
link destinations).

Take care,
Rob

Received on Saturday, 31 January 2009 00:27:57 UTC