Intent to Ship: Support hreflang and type for HTMLAreaElement

[tannal]

Contact emails
mt...@igalia.com

Specification
https://html.spec.whatwg.org/multipage/links.html#hyperlinkelementutils

Summary
Adds support for the hreflang and type properties on HTMLAreaElement, aligning it with HTMLAnchorElement and SVGAElement.

Blink component
Blink>DOM

Web Feature ID
Missing feature

Motivation
Recent developments in standards bodies have led to a renewed effort to align the various hyperlink elements, this change brings the 'hreflang' and 'type' properties that already exist on HTML and SVG <a> to the HTML <area> element.

Initial public proposal
https://github.com/whatwg/html/pull/12446

Search tags
dom

TAG review
None

TAG review status
Not applicable

Goals for experimentation
None

Risks


Interoperability and Compatibility
It's a finished spec shange. Firefox already implemented it. And Webkit has positive view on it. No compatibility issue.

Gecko: Positive (https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=2039500)

WebKit: Positive (https://github.com/whatwg/html/pull/12446#issuecomment-4441291445)

Web developers: No signals

Other signals:

WebView application risks
Does this intent deprecate or change behavior of existing APIs, such that it has potentially high risk for Android WebView-based applications?

None. This feature simply adds new attributes (type and hreflang) to HTMLAreaElement to align with the HTML specification. It does not deprecate or change the behavior of any existing APIs.


Debuggability
No information provided

Will this feature be supported on all six Blink platforms (Windows, Mac, Linux, ChromeOS, Android, and Android WebView)?
Yes

Is this feature fully tested by web-platform-tests?
Yes
For the idl reflection tests we have idlharness.html and reflection-embedded.html. https://wpt.live/html/dom/idlharness.https.html?q=idlharness.https.html https://wpt.live/html/dom/reflection-embedded.html The type and hreflang attributes are purely advisory. So no need for the actual behavior tests for these attributes.

Flag name on about://flags
No information provided

Finch feature name
No information provided

Non-finch justification
No information provided

Rollout plan
Will ship enabled for all users

Requires code in //chrome?
False

Tracking bug
https://issues.chromium.org/u/1/issues/512880068

Estimated milestones
No milestones specified



Anticipated spec changes
Open questions about a feature may be a source of future web compat or interop issues. Please list open issues (e.g. links to known github issues in the project for the feature specification) whose resolution may introduce web compat/interop risk (e.g., changing to naming or structure of the API in a non-backward-compatible way).

None

Link to entry on the Chrome Platform Status
https://chromestatus.com/feature/5070356302921728?gate=6068579079421952

This intent message was generated by Chrome Platform Status.

[Dan Clark]

Can you please request the other review bits in the Chromestatus entry "Prepare to Ship" section (Privacy, Security, etc)?

-- Dan

[tannal]

It's a trivial change. 
Just sent  the `Request review` for all those entries (privacy, WP Security, Enterprise, Debuggability, Testing, Adoption).
Do I need to do anything else besides wait for the review?

- tannal

[Daniel Clark]

Thanks for requesting those.

Most of the reviews do ask you to fill out a bit of info, e.g. the Enterprise one is marked as waiting because the reviewer is asking you to fill out the template in the review (I think the answer to all the questions are just “No” for this).

No other action required unless the reviewers ask, which seems unlikely since like you said this is a simple change. I should have clarified you can also hit “Request N/A” for reviews that you think don’t apply.

It looks like you do still need to request the “Testing” and “Adoption” reviews.

 

Since these attributes don’t actually do anything, I’d like to understand the motivation a bit better. Broadly speaking it does seem good to ensure the different hyperlink elements have similar sets of attributes, but do you know if developers actually use these two attributes for anything today?

 

From: blin...@chromium.org <blin...@chromium.org> On Behalf Of tannal
Sent: Tuesday, June 16, 2026 1:44 AM
To: blink-dev <blin...@chromium.org>
Cc: Daniel Clark <dan...@microsoft.com>; tannal <mt...@igalia.com>
Subject: [EXTERNAL] [blink-dev] Re: Intent to Ship: Support hreflang and type for HTMLAreaElement

 

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[tannal]

 > It looks like you do still need to request the “Testing” and “Adoption” reviews.

Done. Thanks.

TBH, I don't know about the actual usage by developers today.
I don't think these two attributes are used by developers.
The motivation of this feature is purely alignment and follows the change of SVG A element that been approved recently.[1]

[1] https://chromium-review.googlesource.com/c/chromium/src/+/7008071

[Dan Clark]

Thanks for your patience with my questions on this. Consistency/alignment seems like a good enough reason to do this given they're cheap to support. LGTM1.

[Chris Harrelson]

LGTM2

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[Daniel Bratell]

LGTM3

/Daniel

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