Is the 'name' attribute considered outdated for <a> anchor tags?

StackOverflow https://stackoverflow.com/questions/608222

Question

Visual Studio doesn't like on-page anchor tags:

Validation (XHTML 1.0 Transitional): Attribute 'name' is considered outdated. A newer construct is recommended.

I'm using name attributes in this way…

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.1//EN" "http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml11/DTD/xhtml11.dtd">
<html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml" xmlns:xsi="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema-instance" xsi:schemalocation="http://www.w3.org/MarkUp/SCHEMA/xhtml11.xsd" xml:lang="en">
    ...
    <body>
        ...
        <p>On this page&hellip;</p>
        <ul>
            <li><a href="#one">Section One</a></li>
            ...
        </ul>
        ...
        <h2><a name="one">Section One</a></h2>
        ...
    </body>
</html>

Is there really a more-modern way of doing this? Or is Visual Studio full of crap?

Was it helpful?

Solution

You should use the id attribute instead. Works the same way, and you don't need an artifical <a name=...>, but simply

<h2 id="one">Section One</h2>

OTHER TIPS

name attributes are deprecated in XHTML 1.0 - you can use an id attribute in the same way though, see Fragment Identifiers in the HTML Compatibility Guidelines of the XHTML spec.

So you can simply use

<h2><a id="one">Section One</a></h2>

But note that the 1.0 spec recommends playing it safe with something like this:

<h2><a name="one" id="one">Section One</a></h2>

However, your fragment uses XHTML 1.1, where the name attribute has been entirely removed from a and map elements - so you can only use an id.

I believe the modern approach is to use the id attribute, which would be evaluated as an anchor. For example, if you changed

<h2><a name="one">Section One</a></h2>

to

<h2><a id="one">Section One</a></h2>

You would still address it as page.html#one.

You can also link on a section header :

Table of Contents

<P>
    <A href="#section1">Introduction</A><BR>
    <A href="#section2">Some background</A><BR>
    <A href="#section2.1">On a more personal note</A><BR>
    ...the rest of the table of contents...
    ...the document body...

    <H2 id="section1">Introduction</H2>
    ...section 1...

    <H2 id="section2">Some background</H2>
    ...section 2...

    <H3 id="section2.1">On a more personal note</H3>
    ...section 2.1...

[...]
</P>

Source: http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-html40/struct/links.html

I believe the proper way to do it is <a id="one">

Yes it is outdated. You should replace with the "id" attribute.

Quoting w3schools page:

"The id Attribute Replaces The name Attribute HTML 4.01 defines a name attribute for the elements a, applet, frame, iframe, img, and map. In XHTML the name attribute is deprecated. Use id instead."

http://www.w3schools.com/Xhtml/xhtml_syntax.asp

name= attributes are for labeling elements in a form, and can only be used on <form> elements (input, textarea, select etc). For everything else, ID= is used. Exactly why the W3C folks thought two different ways of naming an element (with different sets of allowable characters) were needed is not readily known.

But here http://www.w3.org/TR/html4/struct/links.html#h-12.2.3 I read this: "Some older user agents don't support anchors created with the id attribute." So?

Until <a name="..."></a> is no longer supported by the (X)HTML standard you are using--and not just deprecated--it may be safest to use both name and id on anchors linking to a part of the same page. From the W3C's XHTML 1 spec:

In XML, URI-references RFC2396 that end with fragment identifiers of the form "#foo" do not refer to elements with an attribute name="foo"; rather, they refer to elements with an attribute defined to be of type ID, e.g., the id attribute in HTML 4. Many existing HTML clients don't support the use of ID-type attributes in this way, so identical values may be supplied for both of these attributes to ensure maximum forward and backward compatibility (e.g., <a id="foo" name="foo">...</a>).

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