Re: name="" deprecated in XHTML

Sebastian Mendel wrote:
> 
> i used to use name="" to group equal elements, or in other words, same 
> element placed more than once on a page

As others have pointed out, the general way of grouping things is to use
class.

> 
> e.g. a footnote <sup name="footnote_1">1</sup>

This specific case is clearly a hypertext link, and for HTML you would 
need an A element.  Some versions of XHTML allow links on most elements. 
  Again for HTML 4, the link should have a rel or rev attribute to 
indicate that it is a link to a footnote.  Modern CSS can recognize such 
patterns.

> 
> (and than i used the name to attach a mouse hover event to it which 
> displayed the content from the bottom in a bubble hint)
> 
> but this is now deprecated

There has been no change for the example you quote.  NAME has never been 
allowed in that context.

Except for form controls, NAME started to be run down in 1999 (drafts of 
HTML 4 go back to 1997 or earlier), and for A, it is a synonym (strictly 
speaking you could probably have both ID and NAME, with different 
values) for ID, and in that context is required to be unique, so you 
couldn't legally use it on A in the way that you use it.  I'm not sure 
why it wasn't deprecated for A at that time; it was clearly only 
retained for legacy content and legacy browsers.

Anyway, the semantics of your example require that you use a hypertext 
link, so that is probably the best approach.

Failing that, you can use class.

If you think you need name, in the short term, as you are using XHTML, 
you can create your own namespace, although that might make it 
inaccsseible to the DOM (not checked).  In the long term, you could 
campaign for it as a new feature.  You cannot campaign for it to be 
undeprecated, because it never existed to be deprecated.

-- 
David Woolley
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RFC1855 says there should be an address here, but, in a world of spam,
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Received on Thursday, 26 June 2008 07:16:21 UTC