Basically yes, and he's not the first one that thought of this: it actually "almost" made it into xhtml2 and html5, because it's a great idea that really makes

Basically yes, and he's not the first one that thought of this: it actually "almost" made it into xhtml2 and html5, because it's a great idea that really makes sense. But it will never get to be this way any time soon because behaviors for all elements that have href attributes will have to be specified, including for cases of nested elements with href set. This could happen, but not in the design-by-committee world of web-standards - you'd basically need to have bunch of very smart guys conjure a new specification out of thin air and force everyone else to use it regardless of backwards compatibility or other consequences (unfortunately this will never happen in the world we're living in).