suggestion: althref for <a> in the spirit of 'alt for <img>'

Hello,

I've been thinking about how to make pages with lots of  hrefs to 
'javascript:......'
accesible via browsers not supporting Java script (such as Lynx). At 
first <noscript>
appeared to solve the problem. I tried the following with Lynx 2.8.x

<script language="javascript">
function _win( url) 
{
  window.open( url, 'PreviewWin',
  'width=700,height=500,resizable=yes,scrollbars+=yes,status=1');
}
</script>

Click the following button 
<a href='javascript:_win("link1.html")'>
<img src="button.gif" alt="button"></a>
<noscript><a href="link1.html"><img src="button.gif" alt="button"></a>
</noscript>

A problem with this is that Lynx displays *both* links and it's natural
that it should do because there's no way for Lynx to figure out
the first link should be ignored. 

I thought that it'd be nice if there's a kind of alt-attribute
equivalent for <a>. That is, something like the following would
be nice:

<a href="javascript:_win('link1.html',abc, def)" althref="link1.html">
Link1</a>


Therefore,I searched for
HTML 3 and HTML 4 specs if some sort of alt tag is allowed
as an attribute for <a>. It turned out not. Then, I searched for www-html
archive if anybody has suggested it. I hit upon a suggestion
made in January 1998, but its purpose is different than mine.
It was suggested to address the problem of inaccessible (due to
URL changes and other reasons) pages and slow connections. My
proposal is to support text-mode browsers (and other browsers
not supporting some of features available in graphic browsers)
without removing those features for users of browsers supporting
them (e.g. java script)

My search of www-html was not so extensive and this may have been
discussed already, in which case I apologize for duplication
and I would like you to point me to where I could find the previous
proposal.

Thank you for your kind consideration of my proposal,

Jungshik Shin

Received on Thursday, 26 July 2001 03:55:58 UTC