Target attribute on a: consistency with HTML or with existing implementations?

[AmeliaBR]

As discussed in Issue #315 and PR #409:

The href and target attributes on SVG <a> are inconsistent with their equivalents on HTML links, being exposed in the DOM as SVGAnimatedString objects instead of regular DOMString primitives.

href has a lot of usage & so is probably too much of a web compat risk to change. But @dstorey argued that usage is low enough) that consistency with HTML should win out.

This would be a change from all implementations, and potentially a breaking one.

We agreed on the telcon today to only make the change if we can get multiple implementers all committing to ship code at approximately the same time.

So:
@ewilligers @dstorey @longsonr @smfr
Is this worth making a change? Do you think that you can get that change through your codebase review, assuming commitments from the other browsers?

Note that in #175 we discussed making SVGAnimatedString more string-like with putForwards and stringifier properties (which would minimize but not eliminate the SVG vs HTML compat issues), but that also won't make it into SVG 2.0 unless we have clear implementer commitments.

[smfr]

if we can get multiple implementers all committing to ship code at approximately the same time

That kind of thing never works. But I think it's a good change to make.

[dstorey]

I've already started to implement the update in EdgeHTML but it didn't make it in time for our upcoming release.

[ewilligers]

The current usage of target is very low. If other browsers were making the change for consistency with HTML, I expect Blink would too.