[uf-discuss] a[name] as machine data?

[Ryan King]

On May 10, 2007, at 4:45 PM, James Craig wrote:

> Ryan King wrote:
>
>> James Craig wrote:
>>
>>> Haven't thought too much about this, but are there any obvious  
>>> gotchas to using an anchor element with name attribute as a  
>>> potential replacement for the abbr-design-pattern?
>>
>> I believe a[name] and @id need to be unique across an entire page.  
>> This would make it impossible to have two events with the the same  
>> dtstart, dtend or dtstamp on the same page. I think that makes it  
>> unworkable.
>
> Only ID has that restriction. Radio buttons, for example, require  
> elements have unique IDs but the same NAME.

a[name has restrictions that input[name] does not have.

Per [1], @id's and a[name] are collectively known as "anchor names"  
and must be unique, as they share the same name space. A relevant  
snippet:

> The id and name attributes share the same name space. This means  
> that they cannot both define an anchor with the same name in the  
> same document. It is permissible to use both attributes to specify  
> an element's unique identifier for the following elements: A,  
> APPLET, FORM, FRAME, IFRAME, IMG, and MAP. When both attributes are  
> used on a single element, their values must be identical.

-ryan

1. http://www.w3.org/TR/html401/struct/links.html#h-12.2.1