This is an archived snapshot of W3C's public bugzilla bug tracker, decommissioned in April 2019. Please see the home page for more details.

Bug 6439 - <area> should stringify href (like <a>)
Summary: <area> should stringify href (like <a>)
Status: CLOSED FIXED
Alias: None
Product: HTML WG
Classification: Unclassified
Component: pre-LC1 HTML5 spec (editor: Ian Hickson) (show other bugs)
Version: unspecified
Hardware: All All
: P2 normal
Target Milestone: ---
Assignee: Ian 'Hixie' Hickson
QA Contact: HTML WG Bugzilla archive list
URL:
Whiteboard:
Keywords:
Depends on:
Blocks:
 
Reported: 2009-01-15 12:21 UTC by Simon Pieters
Modified: 2010-10-04 13:56 UTC (History)
4 users (show)

See Also:

Attachments

Description Simon Pieters 2009-01-15 12:21:25 UTC 
IE8, Firefox and Opera stringify <area> to its href (like <a>). WebKit doesn't, it seems. I'd suggest the spec align with the majority.

javascript:alert(document.createElement('area'))
Comment 1 Olivier Gendrin 2009-01-15 13:38:43 UTC 
this question is very important regarding to accessibility of the data.

I good fallback could be to spec that a <map> element that does not match an <img> (not aviable, not downloaded by the UA, etc...) should be rendered as an <ul>, and the <area> like <li><a> :

<map><area alt="areaAltText" href="areaHref" /></map>

would become

<ul><li><a href="areaHref">areaAltText</a></li></ul>

That would be great.
Comment 2 Olivier Gendrin 2009-03-31 10:57:53 UTC 
Ian, I do not see in the area description [1] the fallback mechanism...

[1] http://www.whatwg.org/specs/web-apps/current-work/multipage/the-canvas-element.html#the-area-element
Comment 3 Simon Pieters 2009-03-31 12:22:45 UTC 
Oliver, this bug really has nothing to do with fallback. This bug is about what toString() does on objects implementing HTMLAreaElement.

However, search for "If the user agent intends to show the text that the img element represents, then it must use the following steps." in the spec.