[5540] in www-talk@info.cern.ch
Empty anchor
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (John Franks)
Mon Sep 12 18:10:24 1994
Date: Mon, 12 Sep 1994 23:56:30 +0200
Errors-To: listmaster@www0.cern.ch
Errors-To: listmaster@www0.cern.ch
Reply-To: john@math.nwu.edu
From: john@math.nwu.edu (John Franks)
To: Multiple recipients of list <www-talk@www0.cern.ch>
I recall the issue of empty anchors having been discussed some time
ago but I don't remember the conclusions if any.
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?
2. If so is it a bug in Mosaic or libwww that causes it to fail?
Will it be fixed?
3. Is <a name="something"> alone legal, i.e. without the </a> ?
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.
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
