56121 - <a onClick> types of links don't look like links

Status: VERIFIED INVALID

(Core :: Layout, defect, P3)

Description

[Tobias Burnus]

This is with 2000-10-10-21/Linux (Mozilla nightly).
If a link (<a> only contains a onClick="" and not a href="foo" then it looks
like a normal <span> i.e. as if there where no link. (This includes colour,
underlining and cursor.)
Netscape 4.75/Linux shows the same, but it doesn't (seem) to support onClick.

"12.2 The A element" is not clear how to handle this case. I think it makes
sense to support this if there is onClick (since it acts like a link in this
case). Opera 4.0b4/Linux handles it the very same as Mozilla does presently.

I would either see this fixed or marked as invalid (both after some discussion).

Comment 1

[Tobias Burnus]

Attachment: HTML file which shows a onClick and a href link

Comment 2

[Heikki Toivonen (remove -bugzilla when emailing directly)]

IE 5 and NN 4.7 don't recognize <a onClick as a link. And it isn't, really. The
presence of onClick does not make it a link. It can act like a link with certain
kinds of JavaScript, but in the arbitrary case it would not even act like a link.

Marking this INVALID.

Comment 3

[Tobias Burnus]

[Drop in from the mid-air collision:]
Unlike the HTML 4.01 specification the CSS 2 specification states in "5.11.2 The
link pseudo-classes: :link and :visited":
"The document language determines which elements are hyperlink source anchors.
For example, in HTML 4.0, the link pseudo-classes apply to A elements with an
'href' attribute."

Reading this would make it INVALID, since I think that is not that clear that
onClick shouldn't act like href I wrote to [e-mail] for
discussion/verification (subject=":links and HTML" if you search).

Comment 4

[Loco]

Marking VERIFIED.  Tobias, if the reply from W3 is that it should look like a 
link, just reopen this.  Thanks.  -d

Comment 5

[Heikki Toivonen (remove -bugzilla when emailing directly)]

SPAM. HTML Element component deprecated, changing component to Layout. See bug
88132 for details.