188234 - When HREF anchor tags are nested on a page, clicking goes to URL of outer tag, not inner

Status: RESOLVED DUPLICATE of bug 26583

(Core :: DOM: UI Events & Focus Handling, defect)

Description

[Russell Almond]

User-Agent:       Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; U; PPC Mac OS X; en-US; rv:1.2.1) Gecko/20021130
Build Identifier: Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; U; PPC Mac OS X; en-US; rv:1.2.1) Gecko/20021130

In the page at http://www.piffaro.com/ contains nested anchor tags.

Here is an excerpt.
<a href="pages/about.html">
      <table >
          <tr>
	<td >
	   <a href="pages/calendar-local.html">CONCERT SERIES</a>
	</td>
	<td >
                  <a href="pages/calendar-tour.html">TOUR CALENDAR</a>		</td>
	<td>
                   HOME
	</td>
        </tr>
    </table>
  </a>

Clearly this was built by a loosing editor.  But the current default behavior of
selecting the outer URL ("about.html") rather than the inner
("calendar-tour.html") when clicking on TOUR CALENDAR does not give access to
that page.

Furthermore, both IE and iCab goto the URL of the inner tag, leaving people who
don't test thoroughly to believe their page works properly.


Reproducible: Always

Steps to Reproduce:
1.  Goto page with nesting anchor tags (e.g. http://www.piffaro.com/)
2.  Hover cursor over inner anchor tag, URL of outer tag will display
3.  Click on inner tag, page will goto outer tag's URL.

Actual Results:  
Displayed URL of outer tag and went to that page.

Expected Results:  
Displayed URL of inner tag and went to that page.

This is a reading of a non-standard part of the HTML standard, so it is almost
could be classified an RFE rather than a Bug, but it does prevent easy access to
certain malformed web content.

Comment 1

[Ruslan Ismailov]

I don't think it is reasonable, to open nested links. In w3 specification, we
could read (http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-html40/struct/links.html#h-12.2.2):

Links and anchors defined by the A element must not be nested; an A element must
not contain any other A elements.

So only way to resolve such situation exept current, is manualy finish <a> link
if next <a> is occured. So code like 

<a> text <table> <a></a> <table></a> 

may be parsed as 

<a> text </a><table><a></a></table>.

BTW, it is dupe of bug 26583.

Comment 2

[Boris Zbarsky [:bzbarsky]]

fixing bug 127903 should fix this

Comment 3

[Greg K.]

Resolving dup per comment 1.

*** This bug has been marked as a duplicate of 26583 ***