[whatwg] Update to the Adoption Agency Algorithm

Blanchard, Todd tobl at amazon.com
Thu Feb 2 15:49:32 PST 2006


OK, I have to disagree with this - the id's MUST NOT be duplicated as the end result is simply converting one kind of error to a different kind of error.  I'd also suggest that browsers should be NOISY about bad HTML such that authors are encouraged to fix it (possibly through some disable-able preference).  

As it is now, site authors spend a great deal of time scratching their heads trying to make sense of why things are acting oddly and the browsers provide precious little help in diagnosing the problem.  Making one kind of problem look like another kind of problem isn't "HELPING" us.



-----Original Message-----
From: Lachlan Hunt [mailto:lachlan.hunt at lachy.id.au] 
Sent: Thursday, February 02, 2006 3:15 PM
To: Blanchard, Todd
Cc: whatwg at whatwg.org
Subject: Re: [whatwg] Update to the Adoption Agency Algorithm

Blanchard, Todd wrote:
> What I want to know is:  if the "cloned" node has an id attribute, and 
> id is meant to be unique, then how do we resolve this conflict?
> I mention this because bad html and duplicate id's in documents have 
> caused havoc when trying to build javascript applications.

The ID attributes need to be duplicated in such cases, that's what existing browsers do.  Although it may cause trouble with some scripts that use getElementById() and depend on there only being one instance, it is up to the markup author to fix that.

--
Lachlan Hunt
http://lachy.id.au/



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