- From: Benjamin Hawkes-Lewis <bhawkeslewis@googlemail.com>
- Date: Fri, 9 Sep 2011 20:27:04 +0100
On Thu, Sep 8, 2011 at 4:58 PM, Bjartur Thorlacius <svartman95 at gmail.com> wrote: > Why use <a> when you have onclick and a settable document.location? :) I think there are sound reasons to provide user agent conformance requirements for a at href and to allow it as conforming markup that go well beyond semantics for semantics sake, including: 1. Links are the essence of the web, so if you're going to express *any* semantic in a web markup language, you should express links. 2. a at href is very common in the web corpus, therefore user agents must implement a at href to provide access to the existing web corpus. 3. Making a at href non-conforming would _not_ help authors make their pages more interoperable. 4. We do not want to make navigating the web dependent on executing third-party script, since some user agents do not implement scripting and some users may disable script for usability or security reasons. 5. a at href is a significantly easier to author than any form of scripted link. 6. a at href has built-in accessibility (e.g. keyboard activation, lists of links in screenreaders, etc.). 7. Semantic markup is deterministic in a way that arbitrary script is not. Being able to infer relationships between documents without executing script makes it much easier for automated agents to make use of those relationships. For example, Google PageRank delivers extremely good search results by analysing links expressed through this simple semantic markup. -- Benjamin Hawkes-Lewis
Received on Friday, 9 September 2011 12:27:04 UTC