|On the other hand, if the document contains only <a name="marker">
|with no close to the tag then browsers handle it in the desired way.
|My point was that an illegal HTML construct functions while the legal
|construct to achieve the same effect fails. This provides a strong
|incentive for document creators to write illegal HTML. The fact that
|the situation will be better with HTML 3.0 doesn't mitigate the
|problem much. Much of this bad HTML will still be around when HTML
|3.0 browsers are common. Those browsers will either have to handle an
|illegal construct or fail to provide the behavior which older browsers
|did.
Whether it is a bug in the current browser or not is a question of
philosophy, but I agree that it should behave differently. Newer
browser would do well to flag unmatched <a> tags as errors, but most
parsers will have no trouble doing the "right thing": an element ends
at the next tag that cannot be part of that element. Usually that
means that the content of the <a> is the rest of the paragraph.
|There is still a need for a completely empty target. Can one link
|to a comment, for example?
I disagree. You have to link to something. Linking to a comment is
rather pointless, as is linking to an empty tag that has no other
purpose than to be a target. Neither contains any information.
If you write "see <something>" you're not referring people to a point
in a document, but to some non-empty part of a document. That's why in
HTML 3.0 you can link to most elements but not to <hr> or <br>. (And
why <a name=..> is non-empty in HTML 2.0.)
I can even envisage a server that makes use of this fact: send a URL
ending in "#fragment" and the server will only return that portion of
the document.
Bert
-- ___________________________________________________________________________ ####[ Bert Bos ]####[ Alfa-informatica, ]#### ####[ <bert@let.rug.nl> ]####[ Rijksuniversiteit Groningen ]#### ####[ http://www.let.rug.nl/~bert/ ]####[ Postbus 716 ]#### ####[ ]####[ NL-9700 AS GRONINGEN ]#### ####[______________________________]####[_____________________________]####