Re: Name namespace, namespaces and names in general

The name attribute in form controls does only one thing:
Identifies how to construct the name-value pairs submitted 
to server. Therefore their "current value" should be unique 
when the form is submitted. They have nothing to do with ID.

Section 12.2.3 refers only to  "A, APPLET, FORM, FRAME, IFRAME, IMG, and MAP." 
none of which is a form control. Due to historical reasons these elements
have a name attribute. This name attribute serves the same purpose of ID 
and is deprecated in favor of ID. This should reduce confusion.

Nir.

At 11:25 AM 2/9/00 +0100, Jonny Axelsson wrote:
>____________________________________________
>1. FORM CONTROLS, NAME: SCOPE AND UNIQUENESS
> 
>I am a little confused about the uniqueness of the name attribute in
>different forms on the same HTML page. NAME for form controls have a
>grouping function, a bit of ID and a bit of CLASS. Any control inside the
>same FORM with the same NAME belong to the same group. Two controls with
>the same NAME inside two FORMs do not:
>
>HTML 4.0 standard section 17.2, Controls 
>A control's "control name" is given by its name attribute. The scope of the
>name attribute for a control within a FORM element is the FORM element.
>
>I presume from this, and from the lack of contrary evidence, that having
>the same NAME in two different FORMs is not only legal, essensially NAME
>has a separate namespace for each FORM. This is unlike every other
>namespace that is unique for the entire document (URI). It is also
>problematic, since references like [HTML401, sect 12.2.3] implies an
>equality between the ID namespace, the A NAME namespace and the
><formcontrol> NAME space.

===================================
Nir Dagan
Assistant Professor of Economics
Brown University 
Providence, RI
USA

http://www.nirdagan.com
mailto:nir@nirdagan.com
tel:+1-401-863-2145

Received on Wednesday, 9 February 2000 13:01:35 UTC