Why not allow the href attribute in tags other than the anchor? - EG: <h1 href=""></h1>

Question

I've just been going through a my current project and removing excess html and css where not needed, removing divs around abjects that didn't need a div for example and I was wondering, why do we need achors around everything:

<a href="Cake">
    <div>
        <p>This is not a lie.</p>
    </div>
</a>

Why not allow simply allow:

<div href="Cake">
    <p>This is not a lie.</p>
</div>

Answer 1

I'm overly simplifying here, but it's about the concepts.

In HTML, every tag has a meaning and a function. Sometimes it's purely aesthetics (<b>, bold text), sometimes it's semantics (<span>, a new chunk of inline text), sometimes both (<h1>, a header starts here). The point is to mark portions of text with semantics.

The <a> tag is a hyperlink. Almost everything between <a> and </a> is supposed to behave like this: if clicked, jump to certain URL. Now that URL is a property of the <a> tag and you specify it via href.

This href does not make any sense outside of the <a> tag since back when HTML was born, CSS and JavaScript didn't exist so you couldn't do things like making a <span> clickable like we can today. But even today, it doesn't make sense to allow elements to adopt functionality of other elements as it taints their semantics.

In your second example you have completely removed the <a> tag, so it isn't a link any more. Even if the parser allows href on the div, it'd be wrong to suddenly make it behave like an a tag since it isn't.