Couldn't agree more, I find this to be very frustrating as well. I just came across this little thing and thought I'd share...

http://jsfiddle.net/csswizardry/rxsna/

The links are not really nested, but it does give that effect.

It's quite funny. I can't read this article and I am making a good effort writing this comment as I see a bar floating in the middle of my screen - I am on iPhone.

On the other hand, to access this web page I have clicked a link.

Just write a polyfil in javascript for the functionality you desire on your site. It shouldn't be that hard to implement.

When you talk about "nesting" of links, I am not sure what you mean. If TimBL or any other Web-creators are listening, I would like to propose a special kind of "nesting" of URL-links within the anchor-tag -- a default passage through a series of additional URLs for a resource if the primary link becomes unavailable, through normal "linkrot" or "SlashDot-effect" or whatever. If you link to a document like Lincoln's Gettysburg Address and link-choice number one returns a "Code 404" for "not available," the anchor tag ought to be able to swiftly call up the secondary nested-link-choice and provide the same Gettysburg Address from the secondary URL, or the third, and so on. Any takers?

Thanks for the clarification. Meanwhile, I have linked to this blog-post and shared my newbie-esque Comment with a message http://groups.google.com/group/comp.infosystems.www.authoring.html/msg/4929c522cf846257 on Usenet.

Interesting, however, when I write a blog/how to/etc article I'd rather like people to read it to the end. Hopefully I've made it sufficiently entertaining that they do. So I try not to incorporate links actually in an article, but in an appendix at the end. After all, I really dont want them clicking away and never comming back for the punch line....

My personal pet peeve with the a tag is its double semantics - it is both startpoint and endpoint of a hyperlink. This would have been mended with the href attribute been made general too, of course.

Interesting!? We've done web development for the past 15+ years and never found this to be a problem...

Would you mind fixing your article text area on your site so that scaling above 125% still is readable? At 150%+ the right side of the text extends into the right column area.

That's strange indeed. After many years using a hrefs on my websites now I'm finding that there's something wrong with it. I considered this element as nobrainer. Anyway, you've made your point. Very eye-opening post. Thanks. P.s. On my android chrome this website looks and works like charm.

I think href could be used as xhtml2 as you say. I can't see any drawback. If it was for a compatibility issue, why wasn't an issue when other tags where added? Anyway, now WebKit + Gecko have a large share so if those do understand the "href in any tag" there would be no problem at all. Trident would be only partially a problem because you can send another page for it (hello again IE5/6 problem, I know).

One thing you can do to wrap block-level elements into anchors is to use what everybody has been using until HTML5 allowed anchors to contain block-level elements.

Just write your block-level elements like you want to, and position an anchor right over them.

This way, the anchor element doesn't wrap the others in the DOM, but it does visually.

Applied to your example, it would look like this:

<article class="post">
    <header> ... </header>
    <div class="main"> ... </div>
    <footer> ... </footer>
    <a href="#"></a>
</article>

<style>
    article {
        position: relative;
    }
    article a {
        position: absolute;
        top: 0;
        bottom: 0;
        left: 0;
        right: 0;
    }
</style>