Nested anchors

[valkyr]

Why not?

I know Firefox at least doesn't currently work as expected, but I don't see why allowing nested anchors would be a problem if they were implemented correctly in user agents, i.e. clicking a nested link takes you to that link address, while clicking any part of the parent anchor takes you to its' address.

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<a href="http://www.htmlinfo.com">More on <a href="http://w3.org/html">HTML5</a></a>


Opinions?

[JAB Creations]

Nesting anchors would be like trying to tell someone in a car that the left side of their car can go to California and the right side of the car can go to New York. There is no reason or even potential I see for trying to do this.

[lyosha]

Or that there's a car inside a car and both of these cars can go different places while one still remains inside the other. o_0

[valkyr]

I understand the problem, but it seems the only possible way of marking such a link up.

Take the following...

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<a href="http://guidetowindows.com">Read up on <a href="http://microsoft.com/windows"><a href="http://microsoft.com">Microsoft</a> Windows</a>
</a>


How else would you propose to markup such (hypothetical) links?

You could say to markup each part separately, but that wouldn't be semantically correct. You'd end up with a link :

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<a href="http://guidetowindows.com">Read up on</a>


Read up on what?

Event-bubbling works for other events, so why not standard links? - With proper user-agent support, the browser would know specifically which link the pointer was hovering over. Firefox already does, the problem comes when actually clicking - then focus is always given to the parent link.

[JAB Creations]

Read about [ Microsoft ] [Windows ] with [ tutorials ].

I understand what you're doing though language does not work like that.

[zcorpan]

Why not?

That's the wrong question. The right question is why. What problem are you trying to solve? What's the use case?

Having a run of text look like a link but depending on where you click you go to different places seems like a horrible user experience.

[CACoon]

I thought I'd throw this out as an example of a scenario where nesting anchor tags could be useful. I just ran in to this issue while trying to build a design hack for a proprietary .NET CMS.

I ended up with code that looks like:
<a href="site1"><div class="wrapper" height="300px" width="300px"><a href="site2"><img src="img.jpg" height="10px" width="30px" /></a></div></a>

However Firefox doesn't recognize the link to site1, it only sees the link around the image.

Due to the difference in scale between the two links this is less like trying to sell someone a car that goes two separate places at once, and more like trying to get someone to ride in a car going south while the continental plate moves north.

As for solutions: I'd rather not fill the outer div with an invisible image and wrap the anchor tag around that. but I'm running out of inventive ideas. Any suggestions?

[lyosha]

Since when did the div element even have height and width attributes? Whatever you're doing there doesn't look quite right to me.

If you really want an image that is a link on top of another link, you can easily position it that way with CSS.

There has still not been posted a truly valid use case for doing this, and unless one is posted, I doubt this will be seriously considered.