Changes in HTML 5 - <a> Tag

What's new in HTML 5

The media attribute has been added for consistency with the <link> tag.

The target attribute has been resurrected in HTML 5. It really did not exist in either HTML 4 or XHTML, although it was the easiest way to open a web page in a new window. As a result, it was used on many web pages, which therefore would fail validation.

In HTML 5, you can put the <a> tag around block elements in addition to inline elements. This means that links can appear where they couldn't before. For example, you can turn a whole HTML table row into a link:

<table>
   <tr><td>Label:</td><td>Data...</td></tr>
   ...
   <tr onclick="location=this.getElementsByTagName('a')[0]">
      <a href="new-row.html"/>
      <td colspan="2">Add a Row</td>
   </tr>
</table>

Differences between HTML 5 and earlier versions of HTML

The <a> tag with a name or id attribute is no longer used as a placemark for the target of a hypertext link. Most HTML tags may now include an id attribute for that purpose. Therefore, whenever there is an <a> tag with an id or name attribute but no href attribute, the value of the attribute should be coded as the id attribute of the tag following it:

<a id="whats-new"/>
<p>New features of HTML 5 include ....</p>

<p id="whats-new">New features of HTML 5 include ....</p>

<p>See <a href="#whats-new">What's New in HTML 5</a> above.</p>

An <a> tag without an href attribute is now only a placeholder that may later be turned into a hypertext link via dynamic JavaScript code.

The following attributes should not be coded on the <a> tag because they either have been deprecated or were never officially supported:

• name - if the tag is being used for both a hypertext link and the target of a reference from somewhere else, use the id attribute instead; if it's not a hypertext link, code the id attribute on a different tag at the target location as shown above
• charset
• coords
• ref
• shape

The 2000-2010 Recommendations from the W3C HTML Working Group defined the HTML namespace for the a element type name along with the names of all HTML element types. In older (pre-2000) versions of HTML, element type names were not associated with a namespace.