<A HREF="hands.html" target="content">

Is this a bug in the HTML text, a bug in Microsoft Internet Explorer 4.0,
or have I messed some preferences setting up ?

I'm on page
  http://www.pangea.ca/sorvan/beldandy.html
. When I click on the pictures of the hands
<A HREF="hands.html" target="content">
  <IMG ALIGN=MIDDLE SRC="images/hands-sm.jpg" ALT="B-spline hands"
WIDTH=420 HEIGHT=100 VSPACE=0 BORDER=0>
</A>
nothing happens !
If I right-click on the picture of the "hands", select "Copy Shortcut",
then paste the link into the address bar, then the page about "hands" loads
just fine.

Both methods work just fine in Netscape Navigator
(The 1st method creates a new window)
(it calls the 2nd method "Copy Link Location").

I've seen other pages with <a href="page.html" target=x>.

I know that the HTML standard requires compliant browsers to ignore start
and end tags they don't understand (and attempt to render the content).

What should browsers do in cases like this, where they *do* recognize the
tag (the <a> tag), but they don't recognize one or more of the parameters
(or are these called "attributes") ? I keep thinking the HTML standard
somewhere says say a browser "must" act exactly the same as if those extra
nonstandard parameters don't exist.
But I quickly glanced at
  http://www.w3.org/
and couldn't find anywhere where it specified what a browser "should" or
"must" do in this situation..

I find it frustrating that MSIE is *inconsistent*; with one method it
recognizes that this *is* a link, but with the other method it does not
recognize the link.

--
+ David Cary "mailto:d.cary@ieee.org" "http://www.rdrop.com/~cary/"
| Future Tech, Unknowns, PCMCIA, digital hologram, <*> O-

Received on Tuesday, 20 January 1998 02:16:15 UTC