"Aryeh Gregor" <[email protected]> wrote in message news:[email protected]... > On Mon, Dec 22, 2008 at 5:34 AM, Mark Clements (HappyDog) > <[email protected]> wrote: >> It is possible to have several identical headings on a page, but you are >> not >> allowed to have duplicate id attributes within a page, so it's not as >> simple >> as just using the section name as is currently the case. Note that >> duplicate values for the 'name' attribute is perfectly valid HTML > > No, it's not. > > "This attribute names the current anchor so that it may be the > destination of another link. The value of this attribute must be a > unique anchor name. The scope of this name is the current document. > Note that this attribute shares the same name space as the id > attribute." > http://www.w3.org/TR/html4/struct/links.html#h-12.2 > > The name attribute not only must be unique, but shares its namespace > with the id attribute, so any uniqueness problems with id's would have > already existed with names.
I wasn't aware of that. On form elements (input/select/etc.) duplicates for the name attribute are allowed (and are, in fact, required in some situations, such as radio-button arrays). It's somewhat confusing that the same attribute has different meanings in different contexts! > > On Mon, Dec 22, 2008 at 9:36 AM, Mark Clements (HappyDog) > <[email protected]> wrote: >> But then section links will be incorrect if the order of the duplicate >> headings changes. > > This is and always has been true. Of course, the same problem occurs > in the (far more common) case that an existing section is renamed or > deleted outright. Sections in MediaWiki are not versioned and are > accorded no permanence. This is reasonable enough, since their > content is routinely moved around the page. A permanent link to a > section isn't worth much if the page is refactored and half the > content is in some other section. Agreed, and the proposed (now implemented?) fix handles this better than we currently do. On a side note, I would be interested to know how the purple numbers extension (which was recently announced on this list) handles this. In as much as I understand purple numbers, they give a permanent way of referencing an article, down to the paragraph, or maybe even sentence level. Are these numbers retained across edits? If so, perhaps this can be leveraged to solve some of the various 'sections referenced by heading text' issues that exist. - Mark Clements (HappyDog) _______________________________________________ Wikitech-l mailing list [email protected] https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l
