26622 2014-08-21 05:54:59 +0000 :enabled shouldn't match links, since they have no disabled state 2014-09-24 22:29:53 +0000 1 1 1 Unclassified WHATWG HTML unspecified Other other RESOLVED FIXED http://www.whatwg.org/specs/web-apps/current-work/#pseudo-classes P3 normal Unsorted 1 contributor ian benjamin brunoabinader bzbarsky d eoconnor ian jackalmage mike contributor oldest_to_newest 110381 0 contributor 2014-08-21 05:54:59 +0000 Specification: http://www.whatwg.org/specs/web-apps/current-work/multipage/scripting.html Multipage: http://www.whatwg.org/C#pseudo-classes Complete: http://www.whatwg.org/c#pseudo-classes Referrer: http://www.whatwg.org/specs/web-apps/current-work/multipage/ Comment: :enabled shouldn't match links, since they have no disabled state Posted from: 98.110.194.132 by bzbarsky@mit.edu User agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; Intel Mac OS X 10.9; rv:34.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/34.0 110382 1 bzbarsky 2014-08-21 05:55:59 +0000 http://www.w3.org/TR/selectors/#enableddisabled seems pretty clear that :enabled should only match things that can in fact be disabled.... 110383 2 bzbarsky 2014-08-21 05:56:55 +0000 And there is no clear web compat need for the current spec, of course, nor obvious reasoning that I can see. 110907 3 eoconnor 2014-09-03 16:09:09 +0000 FWIW, I agree with Boris. 110917 4 ian 2014-09-03 17:29:39 +0000 Looks like this is the way the spec has been since February 2009. I don't see any record of why. Given that only Chrome seems to do this, I guess the spec should change. Tab, any opinion on this? 110919 5 ian 2014-09-03 17:38:18 +0000 Apparently WebKit has recently been updated to do this too, actually. I don't have a strong opinion one way or the other. I think it makes sense to make :link match :enabled, since it's quite possible that we'll make it possible to disable links one day. I also think there's not a very good reason to have specced this in the first place, though. The biggest reason I have to not change the spec is that flip-flopping the spec is really bad for morale amongst browser vendors, and runs a huge risk of making people ignore the spec going forward. But if pretty much all the deployed browsers do something different than what the spec says, it's easy to argue that the spec is just wrong. 110924 6 d 2014-09-03 18:24:11 +0000 Speaking just as a web developer I would like to be able to disable links (preferably with the [disabled] attribute), and have :enabled/:disbabled apply to them. I have many times had to add class="disabled" to my links, and change my CSS selectors from :disabled { ... } to :disabled, .disabled { ... }, and change my JS code from .setAttribute("disabled", "") to .classList.add("disabled"), when refactoring from button to link or similar. 110925 7 bzbarsky 2014-09-03 19:24:14 +0000 I would be ok with links matching :enabled if they could in fact be disabled. 110926 8 brunoabinader 2014-09-03 19:44:51 +0000 (In reply to Boris Zbarsky from comment #7) > I would be ok with links matching :enabled if they could in fact be disabled. +1 for that. This would maintain current specification for :enabled, as Hixie mentioned, and provide a simpler understanding of how both :enabled and :disabled selectors behaves. 110934 9 ian 2014-09-03 21:50:32 +0000 Well we can certainly add a feature to make links be something that can be disabled, if there's vendor interest in implementing that. But would we add that feature in the absence of this forcing function? 110946 10 d 2014-09-03 22:50:39 +0000 I would ;) More seriously, assuming this passes the Intent to Implement "does this help mobile performance?" gauntlet of blink-dev, I'd volunteer to implement disabling links via the disabled attribute in Blink. So there's some tentative vendor interest for you... 111772 11 ian 2014-09-18 21:20:01 +0000 bz, hober: So is disabled="" on <a href=""> something you want to implement? Or is this something we should wait on for now? And if we wait, do you want :enabled to stop matching <a href=""> even though it'll start matching it eventually if we add this? 111779 12 eoconnor 2014-09-18 23:28:06 +0000 We're not strongly for or strongly against. It seems reasonable, but it's already pretty easy to disable links in practice. 111833 13 bzbarsky 2014-09-19 19:29:41 +0000 I'm strongly against having a halfway state, I think. Past that, I have no strong views and no immediate plans to implement anything here.... 112147 14 contributor 2014-09-24 22:29:53 +0000 Checked in as WHATWG revision r8818. Check-in comment: Make :enabled not match <a href> https://html5.org/tools/web-apps-tracker?from=8817&to=8818