[whatwg] Simple Links

On Tue, 2010-03-30 at 23:44 +0200, Christoph P?per wrote:

> If you think about various syntax variants of wiki systems they?ve got one thing in common that makes them preferable to direct HTML input: easy links! (Local ones at least, whatever that means.) The best known example is probably double square brackets as in Mediawiki, the engine that powers the Wikimediaverse. A link to another article on the same wiki is as simple as ?[[Foo]]?, where HTML would have needed ?<a href="Foo">Foo</a>?.
> 
> I wonder whether HTML could and should provide some sort of similar shortening, i.e. ?<a href>Foo</a>? or even, just maybe, ?<a>Foo</a>?. The UA would append the string content, properly encoded, to the base Web address as the hyperlink?s target, thus behave as had it encounters ?<a href="Foo">Foo</a>?.
> 
> I prefer the binary toggle role of the ?href? attribute, although it doesn?t work well in the XML serialisation, because it provides better compatibility with existing content and when I see or write ?<a>Bar</a>? I rather think of the origin of that element name, ?anchor?. So I expect it to be equivalent to ?<a id>Bar</a>? and ?<a name>Bar</a>? which would be shortcuts for ?<a id="Bar">Bar</a>?.
> 
> PS: Square brackets aren?t that simple actually, because on many keyboard layouts they?re not easy to input and might not be found on keytops at all.
> PPS: The serialisation difference is not that important, because XML, unlike HTML, isn?t intended to be written by hand anyway.


I think to me <a>foo</a> would indicate it is a named anchor in a page.
Are all UA's intelligent enough to be able to accurately recognise any
form of URL? Also, in XHTML the tag would look like <a
href="href">foo</a>.

And, shouldn't links be as semantic as possible? Consider these two:


      * find the latest spec at <a
        href="http://www.somespecsite.com">http://www.somespecsite.com</a>
      * get <a href="http://www.somespecsite.com">the latest spec</a>


In my opinion, the second one is far more semantic, and is what I prefer
to use on anything I put together. The HTML spec should encourage the
best practices, and making shorter link tags that actually take a step
backwards in the world of semantic markup just seems a little foolish.

Thanks,
Ash
http://www.ashleysheridan.co.uk


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Received on Tuesday, 30 March 2010 15:28:32 UTC