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Re: 1-to-many HTML links, prototyped

• To: Bob DuCharme <bobdc@s...>
• Subject: Re: 1-to-many HTML links, prototyped
• From: "Emmanuil Batsis (Manos)" <mbatsis@n...>
• Date: Sun, 19 Jan 2003 21:46:14 +0200
• Cc: xml-hypertext@x..., xml-dev@l...
• References: <5.2.0.9.0.20030118183937.02943bc0@m...>
• User-agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.0; en-US; rv:1.1) Gecko/20020826

Bob DuCharme wrote:

> Changing the XHTML content model for the 'a' element to allow nesting of 
> them is an awfully small change to make to its DTD. (What would you with 
> with deeper nesting levels? Turn them into submenus.)

Some time ago, on www-style[1] I was also experimenting with nested 
links, only to find out they are illegal. What I wanted to do was to 
present a URI as a link, where clicking on any section of it would load 
that URL (up to the level you clicked on):


<a href="http://somDomain.org/" xml:space="default">
    http://somDomain.org/
    <a href="http://somDomain.org/level1/">
       level1/
       <a href="http://somDomain.org/level1/level2/">
          level2/
       </a>
    </a>
</a>


Supposing that the xml:space would trigger the renderer to strip all 
whitespace, that would render a link:

http://somDomain.org/level1/level2/

...leading to multiple levels of the same URI. Your location would 
depend on where exactly you clicked on that link.

Invalid markup was not my only problem. I also had a CSS conflict since 
the nesting needed to be the other way around. To clarify, I wanted to 
apply the following:

<style type="text/css">
a:link{text-decoration:none;}
a:hover{color:red;text-decoration:underline;}
</style>

To make the link text effect work from the start till the level the 
hover was on. For that to (buggy and coincidentally) work, the link 
would have to be as

<a href="http://somDomain.org/level1/level2/" xml:space="default">
    <a href="http://somDomain.org/level1/">
       <a href="http://somDomain.org/">
          http://somDomain.org/
       </a>
       level1/
    </a>
    level2/
</a>


Of course, I know of no browser that will render that as I intended and 
keep the link interactivity intact.

It's a shame that links that share the same base have no awareness of 
that. Actually, (X)HTML links are not aware of other links in any way, 
nor anyone has come up with "complex" or related links and their 
presentation.

[1] http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/www-style/2002Jan/0115.html

Just my thoughts.

Manos

• References:
  • 1-to-many HTML links, prototyped
    • From: Bob DuCharme <bobdc@s...>

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