Re: anchor awareness (was Re: Richer & richer semantics?)

Eliot writes:
| >No, because A's NAME isn't an ID in HTML.  It's just a CDATA label.
| >That's true of HTML 3.2, also, and there will be nothing to stop
| >people doing the same in XML (and for the same reasons), although
| >in XML they may also use IDs (production 52).  
| 
| Good point, although there's no reason the HTML NAME attribute *couldn't*
| be declared as an SGML ID--it has to be unique within the document.  Of
| course, HTML  has a very expansive definition of what constitutes a name or
| name start character...

Er, no.  There is no requirement in RFC 1866 that A's NAME be unique within 
the document, and in fact the absence of such a requirement could eventually 
become a feature of HTML by facilitating n-ary links.  And HTML's 
definition of a name start character is exactly the RCS's.
                                             
So linking to <a name=foo> </a> is like linking to all elements with a 
particular value supplied for a particular attribute.  (Although today
in practice you get a link to only one of those elements.)


Regards,
    Terry Allen    Fujitsu Software Corp.    tallen@fsc.fujitsu.com
"In going on with these experiments, how many pretty systems do we build,
 which we soon find outselves obliged to destroy?" - Benjamin Franklin
  A Davenport Group Sponsor:  http://www.ora.com/davenport/index.html

Received on Monday, 23 December 1996 17:29:20 UTC