[ntp:questions] Re: Busted link on http://www.eecis.udel.edu/~mills/ntp/html/index.html

Maarten Wiltink maarten at kittensandcats.net
Sun Oct 12 11:25:55 UTC 2003


David L. Mills wrote in message <3F88C449.ADB5C9F5 at udel.edu>...
>                                            If somebody demonstrates a
>universal solution that keeps Microsoft, Adobe, Netscape, Mozilla,
>Opera, Emacs, Lynx, Safari and all the others happy, I would be happy to
>mend my evil ways. It could be that some simple trick manages that
>miracle or I have committed a stupid unforgivable error, but neither the
>Sams HTML reference book nor Adobe documentration point to any
>definitive common solution.

My solution to this should appeal to you: I do what is documented to
be _right_. Instead of reference books or third-party documentation,
I can recommend the W3C HTML specifications to you.

What they say is right, also happens to almost uniformly work in the
test cases that I just checked. I have Microsoft Internet Explorer 4.72
and Mozilla Firebird 0.6.1 on win32, and Netscape Communicator 4.61
and lynx-2.8.1 on Linux. I viewed two test documents with internal
links, one using "name" attributes and one using "id" attributes to
mark targets, both using "#anchor" in links and "anchor" in targets.

Only one of these eight combinations fails to work, and it is the old
Netscape with "id" targets. I blame this on "id" being a somewhat
recent innovation and that particular Netscape predating it, and
worry not about it. Currently, in HTML, either "id" or "name" is
acceptable, and "id" is preferred. So I use "name" for compatibility
and "id" in new development.

Summarily: I've found all four browsers at my disposal to work
correctly with correct, considerate HTML, to wit <a href="#anchor">
links to <a name="anchor"> targets.


>I verified just now that IE works with # and NS ignores it and both
>browsers complain no-page-found if it is removed. It doesn't do a lot of
>good to shame me into published standards if they don't work in all
>browsers. As it is, I salute IE only because it's the biggest gorilla.


The only shame I see is that you've bowed before the biggest monkey
and taken the left option, where it would have been happy with the
*right* one.

Groetjes,
Maarten Wiltink






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