Review Following Hyperlinks

[scottaohara]

Review the differences between WHATWG Following Hyperlinks and W3C Following Hyperlinks to determine if we would like to similarly trim down the steps

[patricia-gallardo]

It seems that the simplification is based around defining concepts:

• what "cannot navigate" means
• what is a "node document"
• what is a "targetAttributeValue"
• how to "get an element's target given subject"
  etc
  I'm not sure either text is very readable - do you have any pointers with regards to which direction we want to go? If some of these terms are defined elsewhere, then repeating them here is probably not very useful?

[patricia-gallardo]

I'm still working out what differences exist in semantics, but I do believe there is a typo in our version:
"Otherwise, if target is an a or area element with no target attribute"

If I'm not mistaken this should be:

"Otherwise, if subject is an a or area element with no target attribute"

[patricia-gallardo]

Other notes:

The section linked to in the whatwg step number 7 seems quite more involved than step 3 in the w3c version:
https://html.spec.whatwg.org/#the-rules-for-choosing-a-browsing-context-given-a-browsing-context-name

Especially it seems that the w3c version does not talk about the impact of noopener wrt choosing the target

[patricia-gallardo]

The similar section in the w3c version seems to be
http://w3c.github.io/html/single-page.html#the-rules-for-choosing-a-browsing-context

[patricia-gallardo]

High level the differences are:
whatwg has added a step before the ones in the w3c section:
"1. If subject cannot navigate, then return."

Further they have split step 3 in the w3c version, into five steps (steps 4 to 8) in the whatwg version.
A part of this difference is that they refer to the section about choosing the browsing context instead of trying to write out the steps.

We could probably do these changes as well (or similar ones), since step 3 is quite long and repetitious, and might be missing some nuance.

[patricia-gallardo]

Relevant whatwg issues
whatwg/html#2619
whatwg/html#2615
whatwg/html#2708
whatwg/html#2681

specifically (at least) these commits:

whatwg/html@d22a9f1
whatwg/html@a68a1f7
whatwg/html@0b31844
whatwg/html@f3c354a
whatwg/html@055e6b7

[siusin]

We're closing this issue on the W3C HTML specification because the W3C and WHATWG are now working together on HTML, and all issues are being discussed on the WHATWG repository.

If you filed this issue and you still think it is relevant, please open a new issue on the WHATWG repository and reference this issue (if there is useful information here). Before you open a new issue, please check for existing issues on the WHATWG repository to avoid duplication.

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