URL "fragment identifier" semantics for HTML documents
- by Pointy
I've been working with a new installation of the "MoinMoin" wiki software. As I was playing with it, typing in mostly random test pages, I created a link with a fragment
blah blah see also [[SomeStuff#whatever|some other stuff about whatever]]
Then I needed to figure out how to create the anchor for that "whatever" fragment identifier. I don't recall having to do that with MediaWiki, so I had to dig around, but finally I found that MoinMoin has an "Anchor" macro:
== Whatever ==
<<Anchor(whatever)>>
Looking at the generated HTML, I was surprised to see an empty <span> tag with an "id" value of "whatever". I expected that it'd be an <a> tag with a "name" attribute of "whatever". I dug around and found the source, and there's a comment that says they changed it from an <a> tag in order to avoid some IE problem with <pre> sections. This confused me — not because of the IE thing, but because it looked to me as if their "fix" had left the whole anchor mechanism completely broken.
Much to my surprise, however, further testing indicated that it worked fine. I wrote a test page with 300 <span> tags all with "id" values, and I further shocked myself when Firefox behaved exactly as I would have expected it to had I used <a> tags. It also worked when I changed all the <span> tags to <em>.
So by this time, you're either as surprised as I was, or else you're thinking "how can somebody that dumb have so many reputation points?" If you're in the second category, is it really the case that I've been typing in HTML for about 15 years now — a lot of HTML — and it's somehow escaped my notice that browsers use the HTML fragment to find any sort of element with a matching "id"?
mind status: blown
