- From: Ralph Ferris <ralph@fsc.fujitsu.com>
- Date: Sat, 28 Dec 1996 10:32:25 -0800
- To: w3c-sgml-wg@www10.w3.org
>At 02:27 PM 12/23/96 -0800, Terry Allen wrote: 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. > >At 04:26 PM 12/27/96 -0900, Eliot Kimber wrote: >Ugh. I didn't realize that. I can see the benefit, although I would think >that 999 times out of a 1000 the intent will be to uniquely identify parts >of HTML documents, especially since none of the Web browsers I know of >support multi-object link ends (at least IE and Netscape don't appear to). > >There is generally a distinction between a "label" and a "name", where >labels need not be unique (ignoring programming languages that use unique >labels) and names, which are unique within some name space. I would argue >that HTML has confused these two and seriously undermined the general >concept of NAME with the NAME attribute of the A element. Note that the Object Proposal does introduce unique IDs: "OBJECT has the following attributes: ID Used to define a document-wide identifier. This can be used for naming positions within documents for use as destinations of hypertext links. An ID attribute value is an SGML NAME token. NAME tokens are formed by an initial letter followed by letters in the range a-z and A-Z (no accented characters), digits, "-" and "." characters. It may also be used by the user agent or objects in the document to find and communicate with other objects embedded in the document." Regards, Ralph E. Ferris Project Manager, Electronic Publications Fujitsu Software Corporation
Received on Saturday, 28 December 1996 13:38:17 UTC