Bugzilla – Bug 864
Spurious error message "area tag needs href attribute"
Last modified: 2011-10-15 12:44:23 CEST
If checking HTML5 with <area> tag without href attribute, the validator complains "XHTML element area is missing required attribute href". However, http://www.whatwg.org/specs/web-apps/current-work/#attr-hyperlink-href states that the attribute is optional.
Do your area element also have an alt attribute? If it does, then it also must have an href attribute. See the part of the spec where it says, "If the area element has no href attribute, then the area represented by the element cannot be selected, and the alt attribute must be omitted." http://dev.w3.org/html5/spec/the-map-element.html#attr-area-alt If your area element does not have an alt attribute and the validator is still reporting it as invalid, then please reopen this bug and provide a test case.