[whatwg] Clarification on hashed id reference

[Geoffrey Sneddon]

On 20 Feb 2008, at 19:47, Adele Peterson wrote:

> I was looking at the definition of a valid hashed id reference, and  
> I noticed some inconsistency.  The first sentence says the string  
> must match the id attribute, but then the last parsing rule says  
> that the string can match the id or name attributes of the element.   
> If the parsing rule is correct, then should there be some rule for  
> determining which attribute should get checked first?

It already says "[r]eturn the first element" — which attribute gets  
checked first is irrelevant. If you search by attribute, I guess you  
need to carry out both searches, then combine the results, order by  
tree order, and return the first.

> And if the parsing rule is correct, maybe the initial description  
> should mention the name attribute too.

It means exactly what it says: conformant documents cannot use @name,  
but parsers must look in @name. They serve identical purposes, so  
there's no reason to allow both in a document, but parsers must  
support both for compatibility.


--
Geoffrey Sneddon
<http://gsnedders.com/>