Should I make HTML Anchors with 'name' or 'id'?
You shouldn’t use <h1><a name="foo"/>Foo Title</h1>
in any flavor of HTML served as text/html
, because the XML empty element syntax isn’t supported in text/html
. However, <h1><a name="foo">Foo Title</a></h1>
is OK in HTML4. It is not valid in HTML5 as currently drafted.
<h1 id="foo">Foo Title</h1>
is OK in both HTML4 and HTML5. This won’t work in Netscape 4, but you’ll probably use a dozen other features that don’t work in Netscape 4.
According to the HTML 5 specification, 5.9.8 Navigating to a fragment identifier:
For HTML documents (and the text/html MIME type), the following processing model must be followed to determine what the indicated part of the document is.
- Parse the URL, and let fragid be the <fragment> component of the URL.
- If fragid is the empty string, then the indicated part of the document is the top of the document.
- If there is an element in the DOM that has an ID exactly equal to fragid, then the first such element in tree order is the indicated part of the document; stop the algorithm here.
- If there is an a element in the DOM that has a name attribute whose value is exactly equal to fragid, then the first such element in tree order is the indicated part of the document; stop the algorithm here.
- Otherwise, there is no indicated part of the document.
So, it will look for id="foo"
, and then will follow to name="foo"
Edit: As pointed out by @hsivonen, in HTML5 the a
element has no name attribute. However, the above rules still apply to other named elements.