Death of the <a> element.

[Le Sage]

HTML5 looks like it's not just going to BREAK the web but destabilize the standards professional web designers have been pressing for if people who have no professional sense of (X)HTML and CSS start having their way with HTML5. I also question the direction XHTML 2 is headed. XHTML 1.1 is the only way to go right now of course with fall back to 1.0 Strict for those waking up at noon...err four...no...sunset?

This is another debate that shouldn't take place in this very thread.

[gdoolittle]

it occurred to me to ask, do we have a way to style link objects in CSS if they don't share a common HTML object name (i.e. the anchor tag)?

we would need something like:

Code: Select all

if (object has an href)  {
  color: #009;
  background: #FFF;
}


it turns out, we already have support for this in css 3:

Code: Select all

*[href] {
  color: #009;
  background: #FFF;
}

just thinking outloud here..

[JAB Creations]

Check the list of CSS3 selectors, you can already do that in Opera 9.5, Safari 3, and in the next 3.x version of Firefox.

[zcorpan]

Attribute selectors are part of CSS2 and have been supported in browsers for ages (except IE6). Or you could use :link, :visited which is CSS1, but wouldn't work in browsers that don't know about the new linking mechanism on other elements.

[SneakyWho_am_i]

True zcorpan, although if the older browser didn't recognize the new links, would you really want to style them as links? I'd opt for :link over [href] so that only the things actually usable as links would be styled as the same.