When one wants to refer to some part of a webpage with the "http://example.com/#foo
" method, should one use
<h1><a name="foo"/>Foo Title</h1>
or
<h1 id="foo">Foo Title</h1>
They both work, but are they equal, or do they have semantic differences?
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.