Re:The HTML A element is broken
by saraid216 on Wednesday March 06, 2013 @07:31PM
(#5335081)
Yeah, I was kinda unclear. I apologize for that.
Terretta covered it as well as I could have, so I'll just elaborate on a couple things.
Using the word "content" is a lot clearer here: the point is that it's non-structural, rather than that it is non-semantic. It doesn't make sense to hypertext structural elements, but it does make sense to hypertext pieces of content.
Let's say I have a massive corpus. That corpus is composed of text, images, perhaps some audio and video files, whatever. That corpus is structured using markup, by saying "this block is a quote of something else; this block is the header; this block is a list and these blocks are its items" and so on.
That all assumes it's text, of course. If it's a 2d image, that might actually be an image map, in which certain portions are sliced off, defined as subsections (much like an UL tag with LI children), and sensibly linkable. Differently, an audio file might have specific time intervals linked elsewhere; we don't have a UI for dealing with that purely yet (and maybe will never find a reason to have one). And YouTube & co have demonstrated ways of doing video linking. If you link to a specific second of a YouTube video, that's no different from a table of contents in a hardcover book: it's the automatic movement that makes it hypertext.
That's what hypertext is. It links two pieces of content together. An anchor tag is just how we've done it so far.
And I need to emphasize that this is an academic perspective and mostly useful for thinking about how to design a browser's API. And I'm overwhelmingly not qualified to do that. As a web developer, it's mostly impractical to think about this at all: it has nothing to do with developing web apps.
Terretta covered it as well as I could have, so I'll just elaborate on a couple things.
Using the word "content" is a lot clearer here: the point is that it's non-structural, rather than that it is non-semantic. It doesn't make sense to hypertext structural elements, but it does make sense to hypertext pieces of content.
Let's say I have a massive corpus. That corpus is composed of text, images, perhaps some audio and video files, whatever. That corpus is structured using markup, by saying "this block is a quote of something else; this block is the header; this block is a list and these blocks are its items" and so on.
That all assumes it's text, of course. If it's a 2d image, that might actually be an image map, in which certain portions are sliced off, defined as subsections (much like an UL tag with LI children), and sensibly linkable. Differently, an audio file might have specific time intervals linked elsewhere; we don't have a UI for dealing with that purely yet (and maybe will never find a reason to have one). And YouTube & co have demonstrated ways of doing video linking. If you link to a specific second of a YouTube video, that's no different from a table of contents in a hardcover book: it's the automatic movement that makes it hypertext.
That's what hypertext is. It links two pieces of content together. An anchor tag is just how we've done it so far.
And I need to emphasize that this is an academic perspective and mostly useful for thinking about how to design a browser's API. And I'm overwhelmingly not qualified to do that. As a web developer, it's mostly impractical to think about this at all: it has nothing to do with developing web apps.