John Franks wrote:
|The problem is that named anchors like
|
| <a name="something"></a>
|
|do not work in some well known browsers. It is necessary to
|have some text between the <a name..> and the </a>. There are
|situations when this is not very convenient.
|
|I have several questions:
|
|1. Is the empty anchor legal HTML?
It is. ("empty" in the sense you meant, not in the SGML sense.)
|2. If so is it a bug in Mosaic or libwww that causes it to fail?
| Will it be fixed?
Depends on what you mean by "fail". I haven't seen it crash.
|3. Is <a name="something"> alone legal, i.e. without the </a> ?
No, it's not.
|I ask #3 because it seems illegal to me, but I notice it being
|used quite commonly because it does work and has the desired effect.
|I guess the point is that there is a need for the empty anchor.
That's why hyperlink targets have been changed in HTML 3.0. The <A>
tag is now used solely as a hyperlink source, while almost any other
element can function as target. For example: <a
href="#something">... </a> can link to <em id="something">... </em>
but also to <dl id="something">... </dl>.
|If it isn't allowed or is broken and some illegal construct
|works then we will have a lot of bad HTML out there.
|
|
|John Franks Dept of Math. Northwestern University
| john@math.nwu.edu
Bert
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