201780 - "href" attribute only works when in an "a" tag

Status: RESOLVED INVALID

(SeaMonkey :: General, enhancement)

Description

[Joe Llywelyn Griffith Blakesley]

User-Agent:       Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US; rv:1.4a) Gecko/20030321 Phoenix/0.5
Build Identifier: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i686; en-US; rv:1.3) Gecko/20030312

Recently, I created a webpage that had links (using the "href" attribute) on
elements other than the anchor element.  When I viewed this page in Mozilla,
these links failed to appear.

It appears that Mozilla only displays links that are in anchor elements.  This
is a serious bug.

Reproducible: Always

Steps to Reproduce:
View a page with links in it that are not surrounded by anchor tags (e.g.:
"<span href="http://www.mozilla.org/>Mozilla</span>").
Actual Results:  
Mozilla ignores the "href" attribute and displays the link as normal text that
cannot be clicked on.

Expected Results:  
Displayed the text as a clickable link.

Comment 1

[Alfonso Martinez]

Please, can you point a single specification about HTML where it says that href
is valid inside anything else that an <a> ?

Comment 2

[Christopher Hoess (gone)]

This only appears in XHTML 2.0, which is a working draft and not yet suitable
for implementation. INVALID.

Comment 3

[Joe Llywelyn Griffith Blakesley]

Sorry, My mistake. I just checked the HTML standard and the href attribute
should only be used on "a", "area", "link" and "base" elements so Mozilla's
behaviour is currently correct.  (However, the XHTML 2.0 working draft does
allow one to use any element for links, therefore this behaviour will be needed
in the future.)