Re: nesting and the newly promiscuous href

Jewett, Jim J wrote:

> I'm most worried about nesting.
> 
> I have seen pages that link each
> header to the table of contents.
> 
> I have seen news summary pages 
> surround the lead paragraph of each
> story with two separate links to the 
> full story.
> 
> I have seen explanatory pages that
> link to sidebars and longer explanations.
> 
> In each of these cases, the new format
> would make it seem "natural" to turn the
> whole paragraph into a link -- which then
> masks a link contained within the paragraph.


Not true. From a quick cursory glance, the XHTML 2.0 draft doesn't 
specify the behaviour of nested links (note the "quick, cursory" bit... 
I could be wrong), but there are far more sensible behaviours than for 
links to mask links nested beneath them.

Given the following example:

<p href="http://foo.com">blah blah blah blah <a 
href="http://bar.com">drone drone drone</a> moreblah moreblah</p>


It is entirely plausible to expect that activating the "blah blah blah 
blah" section would result in navigating to foo.com, activating the 
"drone drone drone" section would result in navigating to bar.com, and 
activating the "moreblah moreblah" section would result in navigation to 
  foo.com.

As an alternative, it's arguable that clicking on the "drone drone 
drone" section should result in navigation to *both* foo.com and 
bar.com, e.g. in separate windows.

Both of these, though, seem a much better idea than for the hyperlink to 
bar.com to be completely "masked" by the hyperlink above it.


- Chris Mannall.

Received on Monday, 8 December 2003 11:25:10 UTC