Re: Empty anchor

Bert Bos (bert@let.rug.nl)
Tue, 13 Sep 1994 13:16:33 +0200 (METDST) 

Message-Id: <199409131116.AA199884994@freya.let.rug.nl>
From: Bert Bos <bert@let.rug.nl>
Subject: Re: Empty anchor
To: john@math.nwu.edu
Date: Tue, 13 Sep 1994 13:16:33 +0200 (METDST)
Cc: www-html@www0.cern.ch
In-Reply-To: <9409122143.AA16625@hopf.math.nwu.edu> from "John Franks" at Sep 12, 94 11:46:43 pm

[redirected to www-html; it seemed more appropriate than www-talk]

John Franks wrote:

 |The problem is that named anchors like 
 |
 |	<a name="something"></a>
 |
 |do not work in some well known browsers.  It is necessary to
 |have some text between the <a name..> and the </a>.  There are
 |situations when this is not very convenient.
 |
 |I have several questions:
 |
 |1.  Is the empty anchor legal HTML?

It is. ("empty" in the sense you meant, not in the SGML sense.)

 |2.  If so is it a bug in Mosaic or libwww that causes it to fail?
 |    Will it be fixed?

Depends on what you mean by "fail". I haven't seen it crash.

 |3.  Is <a name="something"> alone legal, i.e. without the </a> ?

No, it's not.

 |I ask #3 because it seems illegal to me, but I notice it being
 |used quite commonly because it does work and has the desired effect.

 |I guess the point is that there is a need for the empty anchor.

That's why hyperlink targets have been changed in HTML 3.0. The <A>
tag is now used solely as a hyperlink source, while almost any other
element can function as target. For example: <a
href="#something">... </a> can link to <em id="something">... </em>
but also to <dl id="something">... </dl>.

 |If it isn't allowed or is broken and some illegal construct
 |works then we will have a lot of bad HTML out there.
 |
 |
 |John Franks 	Dept of Math. Northwestern University
 |		john@math.nwu.edu


Bert
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